“Mi mwen.”
She went up to the Regency room to unpack her things without bothering to answer Anne-Marie, who was bombarding her with questions. At noon, contrary to habit, she went to fetch her child from school. Jeanne, who had recently dreamed of her mother turning purple from being suffocated by a boa constrictor around her neck, saw her suddenly turn up at the gate, surprisingly spruce, the mask of a young girl tacked onto her face. She almost ran to embrace her but, taking control of herself, merely asked how she was:
“Ou bien mèsi?”
As a result, tongues started wagging again. Some vital information was passed on. It was rumored that Alexandre Arconte was not what he made himself out to be. Instead of an upstairs-downstairs house, he possessed merely a modest two-room shack. Instead of a tidy sum in the bank, he hadn’t a penny to his name. Venal Victoire had realized her mistake. Beauty does not put food on the table. Leave Boniface for this fly-by-night? Reason had taken the upper hand.
These events had a tragic epilogue.
Less than two weeks after Victoire returned home, on May 8, 1902, Mount Pelée started belching fire. With a wave of her magic wand, the wicked fairy turned the pearl of the Antilles into the ghost town visited today by tourists and souvenir hunters. Not one survivor, except for Cyparis, saved by his solitary confinement. Among the thirty thousand victims of the catastrophe there were Philimond and his young bride, most of the wedding guests, the musicians, the caterers, the domestics, and Alexandre. If she had stayed with him in Martinique, Victoire would have suffered the same fate.
Boniface and Anne-Marie had trouble getting over the fact that a year earlier they had danced with a group of morituri, whereas Victoire got the impression of having escaped the arms of a cadaver. She never forgave herself for having left Alexandre when the most terrible danger was looming behind him. Night after night she saw herself making love to a mummy who unwound his bandages one by one, revealing a putrescent flesh. She believed too that she had been punished for having abandoned her daughter for so long. In short, she was in agony. On May 20, 1902, Anne-Marie sent Etienne a letter containing this terse sentence: “Only her faith in God is keeping our faithful Victoire alive.”
I hardly need say that this little-known, badly elucidated incident aroused my curiosity to the fullest. Although we know for sure that Philimond Walberg and his wife perished together with the aristocracy of Saint-Pierre, that the offices of O’Lanyer and Sons, rue Victor Hugo, were destroyed from top to bottom, there is nothing to prove that Alexander was in town on that day. Perhaps by chance, with the help of good luck, he had traveled to Fort-de-France or Le François on business the day before or the day before that. My task proved to be arduous. All I could find in the newspapers of that time, archived in the Schoelcher Library in Fort-de-France, were advertisements for wines and liquors by O’Lanyer, father and son. No mention of Alexandre Arconte. I was about to give up my research when a student from Martinique working on one of my books sent me an e-mail. Her name: Denise Arconte.
Yes, Alexandre was the elder brother of her grandfather, who unfortunately perished in the catastrophe. She had no information of a possible liaison with a girl from Guadeloupe. She thought he was married to a certain Louise Girondin, who, together with their three children, had perished with him. At the most she knew he owned a restaurant in Saint-Pierre called Le Gargantua, something quite unusual for the time, when tourism was unheard of and people ate at home. My research turned up nothing on Le Gargantua.
All that we have left is our imagination.
One evening I pushed open the door to Le Gargantua. Modest. Not much room. Background music: Martinican beguines—“Bavaroise,” “Marie-Clémence,” “Agoulou.” Five or six tables occupied by some sailors from Venezuela. Alexandre carries his virility proudly with prominent attributes. I look at the menu. Prix fixe. Fairly simple.
Cream of pumpkin soup with garlic and shrimps
Stuffed chayotes
Grilled sea bream on saffron rice
Salad of spinach shoots
Coconut sorbet
Without a smile and dressed in the Martinican mode, Victoire is assiduously serving the dishes from table to table and removing the plates. At times, she goes over to Alexandre and they talk in low murmurs. He whispers the orders to her as if they are a secret.
Afterward, amid the rumbling of the volcano, they frenziedly make love.
TEN
This long elopement had little effect on the relations between Victoire, Anne-Marie, and Boniface. Anne-Marie had an unending supply of romanticism that justified falling in love at first sight, something that she — alas! — had never done. She lived the passion through the intermediary of Victoire and reconstituted the affair in her imagination, since Victoire did not tell her very much.
After months of blinding love, the thought of her beloved Jeanne must have haunted Victoire. She ended up confessing to Alexandre, who went into a rage. How dare she keep secrets from him! Why should he look after this papaless child? It would be like eating someone’s leftovers. She let the storm subside, then returned to the attack. He was inflexible. She ended up leaving.
On the ship back home, she almost threw herself into the sea a hundred times. When the shores of Guadeloupe came into view, she wanted to die. Suddenly her decision to return seemed absurd. She was sacrificing herself for a child who would soon have a life of her own, from which perhaps she would be ruthlessly excluded.
Boniface, who was only too happy to get back a body to which he was so attached, forgave everything. He never put the slightest blame on Victoire, content merely to ask her from time to time with a pathetic humility:
“Kon sa, ou té òbliyé mwen?” (You never thought of me once all that time?)
It was shortly afterward, however, that relations between Victoire and Jeanne started to deteriorate seriously. Okay, they had never been very demonstrative. Neither of them seemed apt at those outpourings of tenderness that are natural between a mother and her only daughter. Yet a type of subterranean communication bound them one to the other like a secret passageway. From one day to the next all that ceased, replaced by a muted hostility, at least in Jeanne. It was expressed by mere nothings. Jeanne no longer allowed her mother to dress her and do her hair. She combed her hair as best she could with a mixture of water and castor oil and tied it in a bow on her neck. She picked out and slipped on her panties all by herself. Worse still, she who previously had a healthy appetite began to eat like a sparrow. In a single month she consequently lost twenty pounds, signifying therefore that she wanted nothing to do with earthly nourishment, as a way of punishing her mother, who placed so much importance on it. In a manner of speaking she refused any type of dialogue with her. At the same time, she professed to loathe music, especially Bach, Vivaldi, and Italian operas; in short, all the favorites of Anne-Marie and Victoire. From that moment on she always had her nose stuck in a book with an expression that seemed to say: “I’m the only one in this house who has other things on her mind than stuffing her face with food.”
Throughout her life she affected to despise material pleasures, especially the culinary arts. But was it really an affectation? All began probably by a banal adolescent revolt that gradually took root in reality.
Every Thursday at ten o’clock, in the study where Jeanne did her homework, Victoire persisted in bringing her a cup of vanilla-flavored chocolate that she never drank. One day, without looking up from her exercise books and manuals, she let out: