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 stories, 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: