The servants took advantage of this newfound freedom to sow their wild oats. A certain Bergette spent her time in a slanging match with her lover in the corridor to the sounds of “slut” and enough kouni à manman aws to make you shudder. To end it all, the lover hit her over the head with a bottle and left her in a pool of blood on the sidewalk in front of the house. Victoire remained passive and indifferent to these dramas.
Day and night alike, she kept turning the same thoughts over and over again in her head. What a belt of corpses she wore around her waist! What evil eye had she been dealt with to lay to rest all those who came into contact with her? Dernier, Alexandre, and now Boniface. When she was little, people at La Treille accused her of being in league with the devil and a bloodsucking soukouyan. It was probably true. She looked at herself in the mirror and what was hiding behind her pale complexion, her slit eyes, and rounded forehead frightened her.
Little Auguste, Anne-Marie, and music continued to be her only source of comfort. She could no longer part with the little boy. She had composed a lullaby for him without which he could never get to sleep.
Ti kongo a manman
Ola ti kongo an mwen.
I have no idea what she felt listening to the outdoor municipal concerts because, unlike I could with cooking, I could never imagine what music meant for her exactly. The orchestra from a frigate, La Minerve, that had come over from Fort-de-France for an Offenbach festival, performed The Tales of Hoffmann, La Belle Hélène and once again The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein. As for Anne-Marie, she entertained Victoire with her chatter. Anne-Marie had declared war on Boniface Jr. She had got it into her head to have him interned in the Camp Jacob hospital on the pretext of his inordinate fondness for alcohol. A cousin who was on the board of directors was prepared to issue her with a medical certificate. Needless to say, all these endeavors came to nothing. When it came to intrigues, Boniface Jr. won hands down.
When Jeanne told Victoire she was pregnant again, the announcement was greeted with indifference. Victoire’s heart was not in it.
Fortunately, Jeanne felt as fit as a fiddle during this pregnancy and did not need Victoire. This time, nothing brought them together. Neither the bush teas, the perfumed baths, the little treats, nor the massages or the caresses. Jeanne, who had gone back to hard-boiled eggs and tomato salad with one or two sardines in oil as a bonus, now slept beside her husband. She valiantly never missed one day of school.
On July 1, 1912, after a delivery that lasted a mere two hours, Dr. Mélas placed in Victoire’s indifferent arms her second grandson.
“Yet another boy!” Auguste groaned, who had given up hoping for a daughter.
Patience! His wish would be granted a little over two years later, and the father who had been indifferent to all his children showed a passionate and blind devotion to this baby girl.
The second son, christened Jean, was truly as splendid as a star, like his mother said, light-skinned in memory of his grandmother, with almond-shaped, languishing eyes and well-defined, sensual lips that he embellished later on with a Cuban-style mustache. During his teens he was the darling of the girls and nicknamed Bel Ami by his classmates. Beauty, alas, is not necessarily a synonym for happiness. During the Second World War, when he was fresh out of medical school, former intern of the Hôpitaux de Paris, his promise of a brilliant future was cut short. Jean was arrested by the Germans one evening while returning home to his studio apartment on the rue de Lille. He died of cold and hunger in the concentration camp at Birkenau. Was he in the Resistance? Was his only crime the fact of being black? I have no idea. I know nothing about this brother. All I know of him is a photo, a real one this time, of a young black dandy with a long white scarf wound round his neck, a gray fedora shading his feminine eyes, a cigarette between his fingers, smiling at the wonderful life he thought was waiting for him. The date: July 1932. He was twenty years old.
It was unusual for a woman at that time to leave her young children and travel for pleasure. And yet that is precisely what Jeanne did. During the long vacation Auguste and Jeanne went on the honeymoon they had had to postpone twice. They embarked on the ocean liner for France. They planned to spend two months in the City of Light and leave their four little boys in the care of two maids and three mabo nursemaids under Victoire’s supervision. That was when Jeanne discovered the métropole.
I do believe that France and Paris were truly the loves of her life. Traveling by train to the Mont Saint Michel, she contemplated in raptures the passing landscape as she pressed her face against the window. In Paris she chose the apartments where we used to spend her annual leave on the basis of the districts with which she had mysteriously fallen in love. She had a particular fondness for the seventh arrondissement and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where we stayed on several occasions.
EIGHTEEN
Victoire had lost all willpower.
The house was in a state of plunder. The servants carried off under her nose the barrels of lard, the salted codfish, the smoked herring, the rice and red beans that Auguste had packed in the storeroom in anticipation of his absence. The children went unwashed until noon. Left in soiled baby clothes, Auguste Jr. and Jean had their buttocks covered in rashes. One afternoon when the entire household was on the Place de la Victoire, thieves went into action and boldly carried off furniture and carpets. Something quite unheard of!
This resulted in a raid by the gendarmes in a respectable neighborhood, preoccupied by its image, which did not help Victoire’s reputation. Armed with notebooks, they went into every house, using their poor Creole to address the domestics whom they treated as suspects. Worst of all, it became clear that the robbers had benefited from inside help. They arrested two nursemaids, Gazelle and Priame, who quickly made a confession.
Anne-Marie, who saw the mess in which her friend had got, invited her and the boys to come and stay in Vernou. She would be helped by Délia and Maby, whom she knew from the past. In addition to the change of air, she would be perfectly safe. Victoire preferred to decline the invitation, though she was tempted to accept. She was afraid of Jeanne’s reaction when she learned that her children had found refuge, even temporarily, at the Walbergs. She let Anne-Marie leave with Valérie-Anne and remained stoically behind in La Pointe, where the sky and the sea were swollen equally with bile during this unbearable and suffocating season. The days followed one after another, each one more dismal than the one before. When she walked over to the Place de la Victoire she was deprived of the company not only of her alter ego, but also the music. In July and August the municipal bands took their vacation. She therefore walked around the square all alone, sat down on a bench on the Widows’ Path, and stared glumly at the horizon. She would return to the rue de Condé when the first streetlamps were switched on, for we should point out that at the time La Pointe was no longer a dark and dangerous place. Even the outlying districts were lit up thanks to a dynamic new mayor. Dirty tricks could no longer be hatched in the shadows and there was talk of filling in the stench from the Vatable Canal. The drainage work, in fact, wasn’t to start until years later. But the town was already being modernized.
Soon, however, passersby noticed a man, a white man, who would sit down on the bench next to Victoire. He would hold forth, gesticulating as he discoursed, while she remained silent as usual. Around seven thirty they would stand up, she tiny beside him, who was tall and thin, leave the square, and walk up the rue de la Liberté. Inquisitive bystanders nudged each other in amusement when he kissed her hand in farewell under M. Bartoleo’s balcony.