We returned to Las Perlas and ran into good luck, a freebooter’s ship bound for Jamaica having touched there. From Port Royal, after visiting the women of The House to attend to their indispositions and problems, I returned to Tortuga, now terribly depressed. The island that awaited me was different. The Second Fifty had fallen upon it, Tortuga being changed from stem to stern, and not for the better. Bertrand d’Ogeron, he who was hated for a thousand and one reasons, had gotten what he wanted. In my absence, a ship with fifty females had arrived and the governor had them up for sale. Whoever purchased one could not take more than one, and that one had to be taken to wife. By the time I arrived he had sold eighteen females, three of whom had already left their husbands, with the latter now embroiled in a wrangle with d’Ogeron over the return of their purchase price. But the buying and selling was not what was disturbing the atmosphere on Tortuga. Each of the fifty women had taken possession of a boucan, those huts held in common which the Brothers of the Coast would normally stay in whenever they returned from an expedition, or else they would make use of some slave to build another; and now they had nowhere to lay their bodies down for sleeping except on the rocks and sands of Tortuga. Further, the females had decided they must be sold together with the boucan they were living in, so they could fix it up and arrange it to their liking, and the slaves were forbidden by the governor to cut trees or branches to make others or they would suffer the whip (with the excuse of managing the forests, as if there were anything to manage): all of which, without raising the price they might have brought without the boucan (there was no price on the cabañas, for they belonged to all), favored the interests of the governor who had had them brought from France, declaring them orphans mercifully released from an orphanage, so that the uncouth Tortuga men would change their adventuring life and settle down.
One had only to take a single look at those females the governor was advertising as orphans to doubt that such was their case: rather, they were trash taken out of La Salpêtrière, though not from the Mazarin section or the Lassay building, but from the heart of the institution, from La Force, the prison; and if one knew nothing of that and had only observed their behavior or listened to their language, which was so dissolute that it was surprising to find him persisting in his false claims, it would have been instantly clear that they were not simply destitute females but prostitutes lifted straight out of the mud first and then from the chains and subterranean jail cells of La Salpêtrière. Nor were they like the beautiful women of The House and the other brothels of Jamaica that our eyes had become accustomed to. Poorly nourished, and that is saying it too kindly: half dead from hunger, actually, and well along in years, they were more like dogs in a drought than women. Anyone would bet that none of them would have been sold.… Yet, as the days went by, twenty-seven more of them managed to get themselves bought.… But before getting to those twenty-seven that were sold after my return, I must come back to repeating that although everything seemed to have changed on Tortuga, and that much really had changed, still one tavern apparently had survived just as it was before my last departure, and I took shelter in it with the expectation of sleeping in a cave that many of the Brothers had taken as a dormitory, not far from Cayonne.
I did not have a copper in my pocket but the Brothers took me under their wing and invited me to eat and drink, the pirates being, as I have said, ever generous with their own. Besides, they wanted me to tell them about L’Olonnais’s end and about the bad luck that dogged our recent ventures, just as I wanted them to tell me about Tortuga. Very little had I managed to relate, though by this time I had mentioned my desire to hear the news about what I had already seen on the island, when Jambe-de-bois, an old pirate and one of the men on the Council of the Society, moved quickly in my direction, holding out his bowl with both hands. He thrust it against my body, almost shoving it into me, looking me steadily in the eye without removing that insistent wooden bowl from my belly, and said Excuse me! out loud, while in a very low voice that he concealed behind a blow of his wooden leg against the floor, in order to obscure it from the others, he whispered, Here, take it! I held on to the bowl and moved away hastily, and suddenly I heard a shout: We are cattle but you are pigs! with several voices at once screaming out, Pigs! and then very quickly came three shots in a row, hurled from three firearms. I did not raise my eyes to see where they had come from because my eyes were following the body of Jambe-de-bois sinking to the floor, and as I watched him go down, something guided my eye to the bowl he had shoved at me to take. In the bottom was a folded piece of paper. I picked it out immediately and stowed it discreetly beneath my clothing, against the skin, and continued staring at the scene without moving.
With the words Le Trépaneur, look to him, someone in the midst of the commotion pushed me toward the injured man. Others were trying to get at the group that had attacked him.
The sound of the shouted Pigs! still rang in my ears. I walked over to Jambe-de-bois and bent down to check him over. He was dead. A bullet had gone through his heart. I said nothing but left the tavern. I started walking inland, where there were no buildings, treading the paths that Pineau had loved so and that le Nègre Miel had covered so many times looking for herbs and roots for his cures. Yes, I too, like Pineau, loved the island. Mixed emotions were moving me, stirring my heart. Pineau and le Nègre Miel, my two fathers, had died here, and this was my land.
I do not know how much time passed as I walked around, caught up in the emotion brought on by that word pigs. Suddenly, I recalled the piece of paper Jambe-de-bois had served up to me in that bowl. I sat down on a rock, listening intently to see if anyone had been following me. Nothing was heard but the buzzing of the flies and bees and the passing of the wind through the leaves.
I drew the piece of paper from where I had put it and unfolded it. There were actually two pieces, one of them a long, narrow strip, the other a full-sized sheet covered with tight handwriting. First I looked at the long strip, in the fading light of the oncoming night. There were many rough sketches, but all quite clear: a white man screwing a black man, a black screwing a white, with them grasping each other by the hand; the white man screwing a black woman, and the black man likewise; the woman holding the white man by one hand and the black man by the other; the black man, the black woman, the white man, and a mulatto child; the black woman with a dagger in her breast, buried there by the black man; the mulatto child and the white man in a ship inscribed with this legend: Lord of La Pailleterie with the son of Louise-Césette Dumas. In the next sketch there was a white man screwing a black man and a black man screwing a white; and the last sketch was a small map of Tortuga.
I did not understand a thing. In larger letters, toward the lower end and below all the drawings, could be read this legend:
PRO PHE CY: IF WO MEN ARE NOT PRO HIB IT ED THERE WILL COME A DAY WHEN BRO THER WILL MUR DER BRO THER AND THE PO WER OF THE FREE BOO TER WILL END.