I have often asked myself the reason for this animosity. I think I now know why. Given her status as a servant, Victoire did not possess the aura of holiness that haloed the white master. Her presence was disturbing and humiliating.
APART FROM THAT, they never missed vespers or rosary, Tenebrae or the month of Mary. In short, none of those many ceremonies that the Catholic Church contrives to devise for the greater happiness of its followers. At carnival, however, when the devil appears as a moko zombie dancing on stilts, ringing bells, and asking for coins, they would close doors and windows.
I don’t blame Anne-Marie the same way I blamed Thérèse Jovial for having neglected to educate Victoire because Anne-Marie taught her music. For her it was the supreme form of expression. Ever since Boniface had started snoring in the very middle of Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and a great many guests had dozed off at the same moment, Anne-Marie had taken this as a pretext not to perform in public.
“It’s like casting pearls before swine,” she would say.
Every afternoon she would lock herself in her room with Victoire. She taught her the rudiments of the guitar — a few simple chords over which my grandmother spread her childlike hands — as well as the recorder. But Victoire preferred to listen to Anne-Marie. They were usually personal compositions that she labored over, sending Délia to buy her pens, ink, and lined paper from the Simon Matureau store on the rue de la Liberté, now rue Alexandre Isaac. Apparently she composed beguines, rhythms that were becoming wildly popular in Guadeloupe as well as Martinique. I regret that these pieces have disappeared entirely. Thus, we shall never know whether Anne-Marie was a genius or merely a good musician.
I can but imagine the emotions that inspired this strange pair in the heat of the afternoon as the town of La Pointe lay in its siesta under mosquito nets. They were in ecstasy under the torrent of trills and arpeggios. Anne-Marie, standing, frenziedly stroking her bow. Victoire seated in a rocking chair, cradling the guitar, humming in her reedy voice or dreaming silently like Gauguin’s Brooding Woman. As refreshment, they would drink aniseed-flavored lemonade.
Like every lady of her station, Anne-Marie hardly set foot out of doors. Utterly drained after these sessions, she would sit in the back garden or on her balcony. She would watch the day as it drew to a close, the sky turning orange over the harbor and the darkening silhouette of the ring of hills. The stench that wafted up from the outlying districts upset her. In the meantime, Victoire had gone back down to the kitchen to prepare supper, only a tad more frugal than lunch. She then concocted some pâtés that she seasoned with rat poison and laid down on the sidewalk for the stray dogs. These dogs were the bane of La Pointe, running by day in aggressive, mangy packs. It was not unusual for them to attack small children. At night their yelping and dog fights made it impossible to sleep. To poison them was the only way to get rid of them, since the municipality did absolutely nothing. In the morning their stiffened corpses with bloodied muzzles piled up in the garbage carts that crisscrossed the town.
One picture haunts Jeanne’s memory: that of her mother impassively preparing these macabre meals with the same hands that prepared feasts for the living. Initiated into Greek and Roman mythology, the child thought she was seeing one of those Fates who presided in turn with equal impartiality over the birth and death of humans.
As you can see, life at the Walbergs was fairly monotonous. I wonder whether such monotony was not often burdensome, whether Victoire was not often tempted to slam the door and go back to her own people, their pleasures, and their exuberant, violent forms of entertainment.
The opulent upstairs-downstairs houses or those with yard and garden on the rue de Nassau soon petered out and gave way to the Vatable Canal district. Although by day it was neither lovely to look at nor cheerful to behold, this all changed in the evening. The district became a fairylike realm of sleazy dives and rum shops aglow with alcohol amid the din of dominoes and rough shouts. The dances began early Saturday and the shameless bòbòs would lift their petticoats over their velvet thighs as they danced the roulé, gragé, mendé, and lewoz.
But this class to which she belonged had rejected her from early childhood. Because of her color. This color, without money or, failing that, without education, is nothing but a curse. Once she pushed open the door of one of these dives, a niggerman would be bound to mount her like a tambouyé, his drum. Afterward he would turn his back on her like Dernier did.
We learn, thanks to L’Echo pointois, that sometime in November 1890 Victoire accompanied Anne-Marie to a concert in the Bobineau Hall, rue Barbès. L’Echo pontois had replaced L’Illustration, dead and buried, and likewise claimed to represent polite society. Anne-Marie wanted both of them to hear Léo Delibes’ Lakmé interpreted by the Capitole troupe from Toulouse. This story of a young Indian girl and an English officer sounded interesting. Anne-Marie’s presence that evening caused a sensation. She was eight months pregnant and at that stage it was indecent to be seen in public. People wondered where her husband was and considered it out of place for her to attend a social evening alone with a servant.
We do not know what Victoire thought of the concert. But we do know that Anne-Marie was disappointed. She complained in a letter to her beloved Etienne that the acoustics were bad and in the tenth row where she was seated she could hardly hear a thing. The opera itself did not appeal to her. As for that melody which had been given such a glowing tribute in the Courrier mélomane, commonly called the Bell Song—“Where is the young Hindu girl going”—she declared it highly overrated.
WE DO NOT know for certain what Victoire’s feelings were, sharing her bed with Bèf pòtoriko.
Everything leads us to believe that she first obeyed Anne-Marie and agreed to relieve her of a loathsome conjugal duty. Yet gradually she grew attached to Boniface and in my opinion ended up loving him. Proof of this was her grief when he died.
Boniface was not devoid of a sort of coy charm. He had, therefore, always been his mother’s favorite, taking precedence over his more handsome brothers. I have to say in all truth that most people thought it was simply a calculation on Victoire’s part. She saw in him nothing but a rich “stepfather” for her daughter.
Let us dream a little.
Was Victoire sensual? Was she fond of lovemaking? Everything points to the affirmative.
Nevertheless, men at that time bothered little about women’s pleasure. Women themselves seldom expected to reach a climax. Boniface thrust himself into Victoire four to five times a night. She had an orgasm somewhat by chance. Afterward, they slept in each other’s arms, united by a fear of the dark, a survival of their childhood. When it rained or the wind blew, they felt especially close. The sleigh bed rolled like a sailboat on a swell of blackness. Boniface clutched Victoire against his heart as they waited with bated breath and open eyes for a break in the weather. At the end of the nineteenth century, earthquakes were a common occurrence. For no reason whatsoever, a muffled groan would rise up from the depths. The wooden house would vibrate and crack in all its joints. Objects would fall to the ground. Pictures would fall off the wall. Then everything returned to normal. It was more frightening than anything else, and night resumed its unwavering march.