As for meals, Auguste was not much different from Jeanne. He was capable of lunching off a slice of yam soaked in a spoonful of olive oil and rubbed with a piece of cod or smoked herring, a souvenir of his childhood as a maléré. Victoire however gave him the taste for fine cooking. Henceforth, he sat down at the table for lunch with a napkin around his neck like a child and was served grilled lobster tails or smoked chicken in lemongrass under the disdainful eye of Jeanne, who pecked away at her purslane salad.
“My favorite dishes,” he recalled, on the rare occasions when he talked about his mother-in-law, something he was always reticent to do, I don’t know why, “were not the complicated ones of her invention where she mixed all sorts of spices, sweet and sour, meat and seafood. It was the way she made a simple fish broth with tench and grunt, rice, cow peas, and a sliver of salt pork. For me that was a feast.”
Auguste was the only one in the household to be spared criticism by the servants and the neighbors’ gossip. They pitied him, rather, having to live with such a mother-in-law and married to a shrew he was incapable of taming. In actual fact, contrary to what people thought, he was somewhat hard-hearted and indifferent to anything that didn’t concern Jeanne or himself. He never shared his wife’s idealism on the values of secular education nor the generous aspirations of the Grands Nègres who claimed to lead the entire Race onward. His only concern was to make money. He spent his time satisfying the obscure dreams of a child born in a hovel on the Morne à Cayes and finished up brandishing his cutlass, dressed in khakis, and playing the gentleman farmer and banana planter on his property in Sarcelles.
The round of visits to the Grands Nègres in La Pointe, however, was just as imperative as in Le Moule and also took place on Sunday afternoons, since high mass at the cathedral of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul took up the mornings, dress preparations and gossiping in front of the church included. Edgar Littée, a bourgeois mulatto, had the idea of capturing on film daily scenes in the life of this society of mimicry in La Pointe: a riot of drapes and wide-brimmed hats, little boys dressed in sailor suits and the girls in frilly dresses. Here and there a black face, if we don’t include the mabos, the nursemaids. In La Pointe the club of Grands Nègres was more closely organized. Its members all lived in close proximity to one another, in a neighborhood situated symbolically far from the white Creoles, but also far from the stench of the outlying district where the maléré lodged.
When I returned to Pointe-à-Pitre after an absence of twenty years, I realized I had practically never crossed the Vatable Canal. All I knew of the town was the narrow quadrilateral where I had been brought up. I had to go back and discover its shacks, its yards, and its storm channels swarming with guppies.
In actual fact, the members of the club of Grands Nègres were never very many in number. As the years went by, it became increasingly difficult to join. It was no longer just a question of education or being one of the first physicians or first teachers. Apart from the basic rules of occupying a certain position in society, living in an upstairs-downstairs house, speaking only French, and having been at least once to France and stayed in Paris, more subtler edicts were proclaimed. Monsieur Cabriou, for instance, magistrate, who roared with laughter in the most vulgar way, displaying the pink velvet of his uvula, and whose wife sat on enormous buttocks, was excluded forever. More than in Le Moule, Victoire loathed these visits. Alas, she was forced to accompany Auguste and Jeanne on every one of them, walking three steps behind them. She sat without a smile or a word, never answering questions, turning her glass of grenadine round and round in her hands. Soon an even more terrible ordeal loomed.
Together with a group of Grands Nègres, Auguste planned to establish a bank, the Caisse Coopérative des Prêts, which was the exact name for this institution that in fact was quite modest. The members of the future board of directors decided on a weekly dinner with their wives. Wasn’t sitting round a table for a meal the most convivial way of getting to know one another? Auguste and Jeanne, who had an outstanding cook at home, offered to be the hosts for such gatherings. I believe the idea was Auguste’s; he was afraid that his mother-in-law was finding life on the rue de Condé somewhat empty. Like at Anne-Marie’s, Victoire found herself in the position of a writer forced to honor a commission from her publisher. Very quickly, her work weighs heavy on her, becomes unbearable and a chore. For cooking, like writing, can only blossom in an atmosphere of total freedom and cannot stand constraints. The devil with rules, treatises, manifestos, and poetic arts. Paradoxically, Jeanne was constantly on her back, overwhelming her with suggestions.
“How about cooking your splendid stew of crayfish in lemon and green mangoes? Or your guinea fowl with currants and honey?”
“No! Whatever they pretend, those people have no palate. Just do a chicken fricassee served with a gratin of green golden apples.”
“No! Rather pork with saffron and coconut milk served with Creole rice.”
Victoire complied, without sulking and without betraying any grudge. It would have been all right if she could have stayed in the kitchen with the servants facing the dishes she had contrived to cook. But once again Jeanne forced her to get dressed, sit in the drawing room with the guests, sit down at the table with them, and listen to an incomprehensible conversation in which she was incapable of taking part. However much the guests heaped compliments on her, she got the feeling she was not in her place. The devotion that Jeanne showed her at those meals appeared to her ostentatious and theatrical. She was convinced it was nothing but a smokescreen designed to conceal to what degree she was ashamed of her. So she hunkered down at the end of the table, silent and sickened, offering the sight of her profound distress to one and all.
“Poor Madame Quidal! You do feel sorry for her!” commented the diners back home with a full stomach, having eaten their fill.
“What can you expect with a daughter like that. She’s a real pain!”
We would be wrong in thinking that Jeanne, like Anne-Marie at the time, got any pleasure out of these weekly gatherings. For her too, but for different reasons, they were torture. It was not just the smell from the mounds of food that turned her stomach together with the sight of the so-called distinguished guests stuffing themselves greedily, Auguste worst of all. What an appetite he had! It was because she was the youngest of the group. They treated her like a child who meddles with grown-up affairs instead of minding her own business. She suggested for instance that the future employees of the Caisse Coopérative des Prêts wear badges with their names on them. A ridiculous idea! Some of them had known the first Madame Boucolon, Antoinette Sambalas, and hinted that she was far better than the second. Less beautiful. Less elegant. Less educated, that’s for sure — she was merely a salesgirl in the haberdashery department of the store Au Dernier Chic — but that didn’t mean she wasn’t less adorable, less agreeable, and she knew where a woman’s place was.