Dusk and its sudden darkness brought them back to Vernou.
When they arrived, Maby and Délia had already set candles in the candlestick holders and placed earthenware pots in which lemongrass was burning to drive away the mosquitoes. Anne-Marie was sight-reading some Bach in her room. Valérie-Anne huddled up against Victoire in fright. A wall had closed in around the house, thick and impenetrable. Oh God! What was that on the branch of the ylang-ylang tree? What was that galloping along the road? Was it Man Ibè’s three-legged horse? It sounded just like it: clippity-clop, clippity-clop. It was hardly more reassuring inside. The flickering from the candles drew a carnival of grinning faces on the walls. The childless mother cuddled in her arms the motherless child, and other tales welled up in her heart as she remembered the nights with Caldonia:
Sé té an madamm ki te ni an ti bolòm…
Ah, if only she had nestled her child against her breast like this! If only she had played her lullabies on the guitar! The truth was that Jeanne had always intimidated her. Even as a baby in her cradle gorged with milk, Jeanne would raise her little head and look at her with gleaming eyes. She was her daddy’s daughter. Not hers. She belonged to that world of audacity, ambition, moral strength, and intelligence. Not hers: the one where the servants know only how to say Yes, Master.
At the end of July, the two Bonifaces arrived and brought a change of routine. They could no longer bear the oven that La Pointe had become. The end of the dry season had been terrible. As a result of the heat, fires had devastated the outlying districts and burnt two or three large families to a cinder. In a single night seventeen children had perished. The health services now feared another outbreak of yellow fever. Consequently, those who had the means fled to take refuge in the vicinity of Saint-Claude because of its altitude and the proximity to the Camp Jacob hospital. The actual truth was that Boniface Sr. found he had been deprived of his beloved Victoire far too long. As for Boniface Jr., he had had enough of his daily trips to the store on the Lardenoy wharf. Once he was in the constant company of his mother, however, he regretted his decision.
Four weeks later, in early September, it was Jeanne’s turn to arrive from Basse-Terre after a ten-hour carriage drive to Petit-Bourg. There she had completed her journey in an ox cart. The driver succumbed under the weight of a trunk whose contents of books she proudly displayed on the shelves of a deux corps bookcase. Guy de Maupassant. Stendhal. Balzac. Flaubert. Baudelaire. She showed little emotion on seeing her mother, whom she hadn’t embraced for over a year, and she did not scold her for never visiting her at the boarding school. On this point, they understood each other without saying a word. However, at dinner — an extravaganza of conch and crab invented by Victoire in her honor — Jeanne proved she had a soft spot to anyone who doubted it. She had spent all the money she had earned from her remedial courses to buy a gold choker from Luigi Venutolo, the finest jeweler in La Pointe, which she clasped around her mother’s neck. It was the first piece of jewelry that Victoire possessed, except for a pair of Creole earrings and a chain, neither of which had much value, a gift from Anne-Marie or Boniface. It brought tears to Victoire’s eyes. Yet all she could do was whisper a thank-you with head lowered:
“Mèsi!”
Then mother and daughter embraced awkwardly. After that, Jeanne ripped at her mother’s heart by refusing to taste her dish. She insisted she was not hungry, was utterly exhausted, and withdrew very early to the room she had been allocated.
Jeanne was never to set foot in Vernou again. Not that she did not like the area. The first thing she did when she decided to build a change-of-air house with my father was to choose a spot at Sarcelles, only a few miles from Vernou in the district of Petit-Bourg. It was because during this stay she accumulated a store of bad memories. She found the situation utterly unbearable. Although large, the house did not have the arrangements or configuration of the one on the rue de Nassau. All the rooms were on the same level with a wraparound veranda and no attic. Maby and Délia slept in a small cabin at the bottom of the garden. Amid this promiscuity, together with the casualness of the holidays, the masks were off. Jeanne could not bear seeing Victoire and Boniface go into the same bedroom holding a candle. The four-poster bed of locustwood where they slept seen through the half-open door made her vomit. At night she listened for every creak in the wood. Her frenzied mind mistook the groan of the wind for her mother’s moans of pleasure, and in the morning she would stare at her in disgust. She was no different than a courtesan, a woman who sold her body, except that those Italian women were usually excellent poets, whereas Victoire couldn’t even read. Her mood translated into her refusal to feed herself, which perhaps today we would call anorexia or something similar. At mealtimes she would ostentatiously push her plate away after one or two mouthfuls and claim that the delicious smells of basil, ginger, and saffron that emerged from the kitchen made her feel sick. She disliked Valérie-Anne’s pranks. She could not stand Anne-Marie’s and Victoire’s musical sessions. Anne-Marie’s viola got on her nerves and the faltering chords of her mother’s guitar and recorder exasperated her.
Plus Boniface Jr.’s advances.
Well hung like his father, but rougher and more enterprising, he was always touching her, groping her breasts and buttocks. One morning he managed to enter her room, where she was reading La Chartreuse de Parme in bed. He greedily planted a kiss on her mouth while his hand undid his fly. What a pity for my story he did not take her by force! Unfortunately, nothing serious happened. She fought him off. They remained staring at each other, both panting with desire. But Jeanne would have died rather than admit it.
Another time she went with her mother and Valérie-Anne to Prise d’Eau. Boniface Jr. caught up with them unawares, and since the weather was fine he went for a swim. At the time the mere idea of nudity was improper. The beauty of this athlete’s body parading his assets that were difficult to conceal aroused in Jeanne an emotion she felt to be shameful. In a rage, she returned home to Vernou alone.
Thereupon, Jeanne imagined that in order to humiliate her Anne-Marie was encouraging her son. This seems unlikely given the little interest she showed in her son. In fact, she only spoke to him when they were bridge partners. Jeanne, however, felt really humiliated — or quite simply jealous — when looking out of her bedroom window in the predawn she saw Boniface Jr. creep out of the maid’s quarters. He was sleeping with one of them, but which one? Délia was at least ten years older than he was and mother of a multitude of children. Maby was just a kid. In his eyes, therefore, she was nothing but black meat he could take for pleasure as he wished. Not an ounce of feeling in his propositions. Moreover, she was convinced a white man could never love a black woman. Only lust and concupiscence could exist between them.
In fact, the holidays ended unpleasantly for everyone. It was the very height of the rainy season. That year there were no hurricanes or gales, but the rain intensified. Torrents of water poured monotonously from the sky. The gutters overflowed. The garden was transformed into a muddy lake. The rain put an end to the walks through the forest or swimming at Prise d’Eau. They would drink grogs with heavy doses of Féneteau les grappes blanches rum. As a distraction, relatively speaking, on Sundays, braving the bad weather, the family would drive down to the church in Petit-Bourg where Boniface had negotiated the hire of a pew in the center aisle. The Walbergs huddled together on the bench under the inquisitive looks of the natives: Anne-Marie and the two Bonifaces displaying their ostentatious devotion as notables and declaiming in a loud voice the words in Latin; Valérie-Anne, bored to death; Victoire, crushed by the silent hostility of her daughter, barely containing her tears; Jeanne having no time for the Confiteor, the Agnus Dei, or the Sanctus, but beating her breast instead and repeating: