“How are you, Madame Quidal?”
“God willing.”
She did not have the courage and proudly walked past, her eyes fixed on the foliage of the sandbox trees. This memory, together with that of a multitude of minor and major betrayals, probably tortured her up to her death.
After completing the training course, she was assigned to the girls’ elementary school at Dubouchage in La Pointe — quite a promotion. It was a huge establishment for its time, the biggest school on the island in number of pupils and classes. She worked there as a schoolmistress for thirty-seven years and people are not yet ready to forget her. Many were the pupils who hated her; many were those who adored her. She left none of them indifferent. At over seventy, Michèle M—, with tears in her eyes, reminded me recently of her status as teacher’s pet.
“I was her favorite pupil. After school, I was the one who always carried the homework she had to correct back to her house. At ten o’clock recreation she would send me to fetch her a cup of milk and a buttered slice of bread. Adelia, the maid, would arrange the plate on a little wicker tray that she covered with a doily. I can remember her favorite cup, orangey yellow, decorated with a Japanese lady in a kimono. Her house was filled with lovely things, all sorts of curios I had never seen before.”
FOURTEEN
In August, taking advantage of Anne-Marie’s dentist appointment, Jeanne made an exception and set foot once again in the house on the rue de Nasssau to inform Victoire she was to be married the following month.
Victoire was in the kitchen cleaning a capon she had the inspiration to stuff with green papayas, cinnamon, and diced bacon.
“Pouki sa?” she asked, inspecting surreptitiously her daughter’s belly.
“I’m not pregnant,” Jeanne reassured her coldly.
That’s not the way we do things, her stuffy person and prim posture was saying. So why? What was the hurry? Why was she rushing into marriage? She had just reached twenty. With her physique, her prestige as an elementary school teacher, and, by no means insignificant, her salary, she was an enviable match. She had every freedom to choose and all the time in the world. Auguste Boucolon, Grand Nègre, admittedly could boast of never putting a foot wrong! Brought up by his mama, who was abandoned long before his birth by her seafaring common-law husband, he had proven to be unusually intelligent ever since the local elementary school. He was one of the first to win a scholarship to the Lycée Carnot. Moreover, he was considered good-looking. Supremely well attired. A genuine Beau Brummel with his choice of hats — fedora, boater, and pith helmet — as well as his well-tailored suits. But at the age of forty-two he was older than the mother of his betrothed and already balding, displaying a crown of graying hair. Furthermore, he was a widower, father of two small boys and an illegitimate daughter, conceived while he was a schoolboy, who worked at the registrar’s office at city hall and whose mother sold her produce in the market. All that wasn’t very romantic!
I was told that despite appearances he was not lacking in lyricism. Apparently, he confided in a friend:
“If I don’t have her I’ll kill myself.”
Going down on one knee, he was reported to have assured her:
“I will be the quilt of your life.”
Or else:
“Like Orpheus, I would descend to the ends of the underworld for you if need be.”
In his desire to please her, it was said he gave up a ten-year liaison with his mistress, who was convinced she would have a wedding band on her finger after his first wife died. Victoire, who was not at all thrilled by these wedding plans, did not even think of raising an objection. She knew full well she had no say in the matter.
Although the announcement of Jeanne’s wedding and her setting up house in La Pointe was to nobody’s liking, it drove Boniface to despair. For him it meant one thing: the end of his relationship with Victoire. Jeanne would require it. Furthermore, he knew Victoire was accustomed to obeying and secretly terrified by her daughter. She was not up to defending a love that her daughter considered intolerable and even more despicable than adultery. At night, he tried to win her over. But Victoire as usual didn’t say a word.
It was perhaps as a result of this distress, tension, and anguish that he contracted the illness, never clearly diagnosed, which was to carry him off so quickly. Anne-Marie had no qualms spreading the rumor that he was dying of a broken heart, from having been cast aside, something Victoire’s detractors were quick to believe.
In a threatening letter, Anne-Marie ordered Jeanne to come and officially introduce her fiancé. Weren’t Boniface and herself a sort of adopted parents? They had ensured her education and paid for her schooling. In short, they had made her what she was. They had even provided her with a dowry. Anne-Marie did not know that on his death Boniface had left a legacy for Jeanne. Consequently, to call the modest sum he had placed in her account a dowry was the product of Anne-Marie’s exaggerated imagination, which had no bounds. Jeanne grudgingly complied.
Auguste therefore had two magnificent bouquets of roses delivered, one for each of the mothers — the biological and the foster — chocolates for Valérie-Anne, and Havana cigars for the father and son. This did not prevent Boniface Jr. in his jealousy from refusing to attend and going to lunch alone at the Hotel des Postes, where his father had an account. It was at that time he sent Jeanne the letter that I have already mentioned. I don’t know whether she answered it. I discovered it over sixty years later in her personal papers.
On the said day, Auguste and Jeanne turned up at the rue de Nassau on the dot, unusual in our climate. Under the avid looks of the servants who were watching the scene from the yard, Auguste removed his boater and with a click of his heels kissed the hand of Anne-Marie.
Mary mother of Jesus! Where on earth did these Negroes learn such things?
Jeanne took off her cotton gloves to show her engagement ring, a good-size diamond, purchased by catalog from the Belles Pierres store in Reims, the French affiliate of a factory in Antwerp. While drinking the Bollinger champagne before the meal, Auguste elaborated his plans and discreetly introduced himself as a good match: a six-room town house and enough to buy a change-of-air house given his solid bank account. It was Anne-Marie who responded, and without her realizing it, unless it was deliberate, her short speech was deeply hurtful. She recalled that without her, without Boniface especially, Jeanne would not have achieved her uncommon status and would probably be speaking a heavy Creole, hiring her services to some bourgeois family, scrubbing their floors and emptying their chamber pots. In exchange for so much kindness she was merely asking for a little respect and gratitude.
Pale with rage, Jeanne had to drink a toast with her.
Victoire had cooked a meal whose menu unfortunately nobody has kept. She arranged it in a lavish dinnerware set as if it were a cooking competition, but left it up to the servants to carry in the dishes. For once, she sat down at the table, to the left of Boniface, as the second Madame Walberg, with Anne-Marie on his right. Auguste laid down once and for all the tone of his relations with Victoire. Given their similar ages, relations should have been fraternal. There was, however, never any intimacy between them. Deep down, she had little sympathy for him, considering him not good enough for her jewel of a daughter, like all mother-in-laws. As for him, we shouldn’t be under any illusion. He despised her. Beneath his easygoing manners, he was intolerant, a militant black like all the Grands Nègres, convinced that sexual relations by a woman of color with a white Creole constituted an intolerable scandal. If Fanon had already written Black Skin White Masks, Auguste would have certainly appreciated the pages on the complex of lactification. The only agreeable element was when he spoke to Victoire in Creole; in his mouth the language he had also used to speak to his mother took on a different and intimate inflection.