Who was this man?
We must confess that it was a strange case. The gendarme Antoine Deligny had successfully conducted the investigation on the burglary of the Boucolon house, rue de Condé. Fifteen years of living in Guadeloupe had given him a sixth sense and without encountering any opposition he had laid his hands on the crooks in a few days. They were a gang he had had his eyes on for some time. They holed up in one of the hovels on the edge of the canal. Their leader was called Isidore Gwo Siwo. Antoine Deligny was a singular man, of an unusual appearance. He was almost six feet six inches tall, still young, forty, forty-five, with a mop of icy white hair covering the top of his head. His metallic blue eyes looked right through you. A few years earlier he had had the immense grief to lose both his wife and his two sons, carried off by an epidemic of typhoid fever. The reason he stayed in La Pointe was because he could not resign himself to leave behind their graves, which he decorated daily with white lilies and purple heliotropes. In the case in question, I can but hazard a guess, since I have been unable to untangle the truth. Was grief the common factor for drawing Deligny and Victoire to each other? Deligny was apparently adept at spiritualism. He turned pedestal tables and communicated with his departed. In this way he said he was capable of conversing with his wife, who even went so far as to write him love letters that he carefully kept in a drawer under lock and key. Did he assure Victoire that she too could see again those she had lost? Did he soothe her nagging remorse regarding Boniface’s death? Was that the real reason for her frequent visits to the gendarmerie after daily mass? Antoine Deligny was comfortably housed on the second floor of the police station opposite the church of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Pauclass="underline" an office, three rooms, a bathroom with a large tub and a shower, a kitchen, and a store room. One of these rooms, filled with tables, chairs, and mirrors, was out of bounds because it was here the séances took place.
I have roamed around the police station quite a bit, hoping in vain to obtain some explanation. Unfortunately, too many years have passed. The gendarmes themselves have changed and darkened in skin. Many young Guadeloupeans now choose to become gendarmes the way they join the state security police force — in order to escape unemployment.
These rendezvous on the Place de la Victoire and visits to the gendarmerie had been going on for some weeks when the SS Isaura moored alongside the quay. Jeanne was back, exalted by the marvels of Paris, whose memory still haunted her. Never had La Pointe seemed to her so small and mean. She and Auguste had attempted to decipher the Mona Lisa’s smile in the Louvre. They had even traveled to Chartres by train to admire the cathedral’s famous angel. After having heard the habanera from Carmen so many times, Jeanne had dragged Auguste to the opera. But they had both been bored to death. The love of José for his cigar worker had left them cold. Jeanne had brought back four trunks full of clothes, toys for the children, and records for Victoire: The Barber of Seville, The Sicilian Vespers, and Rigoletto as well as rugs, paintings, and ornaments for her house, which had acquired the reputation of being one of the best decorated in La Pointe, years before the one on the rue Alexandre-Isaac. Her mother seemed to be in better shape than when she left. Relaxed. Less pale. Almost smiling. The perfect grandmother. She tenderly helped Auguste take his first steps along the balcony and lulled Jean to sleep.
Alas, some good souls, who did not dare approach Jeanne, took it upon themselves to inform Auguste of the reasons for this metamorphosis and made no secret of their comments.
“It hasn’t been six months since she buried Boniface Walberg! And already she’s seeing someone else! If she hasn’t a heart, at least she should behave herself!”
Deeply upset, Auguste waited three days before he picked up courage to tell Jeanne, who couldn’t believe her ears. A gendarme! In order to understand their reaction, we must bear in mind what the gendarmes represented in the social hierarchy of the time. The gendarme was the very opposite of the white Creole and the most vile and despised category, the last rung on the ladder: a martinet who does the colonizers’ dirty job. The fact that Victoire, after Boniface, had teamed up with a gendarme betrayed an uncommon wish to hurt both her daughter and son-in-law. It was also a sign of perversion. The enormity of the accusation stunned Auguste. He had started to assume his role of extinguishing the home fires and refused to fully believe in such an accusation.
“Ask her,” he advised. “Let her speak. See what she has to say.”
Jeanne went straight for it, head down.
Personally, I remain convinced that there was nothing between Victoire and Deligny but the séances, the invocations to the deceased, and words of comfort on his part. In my opinion, they shared solitude and grief, not sensuality. Victoire, then, was almost forty years old. An ancestor, an old woman for her time. The time had not yet come when people got married with one foot in the grave. Jeanne was so easily duped and so quick to swallow the slander because, deep down, she had always considered her mother a sort of Jezebel. I think that, beside herself with anger, she lost all sense of proportion and Victoire, as usual, did not defend herself. It was the final split between the two women. And it was never to mend either.
Antoine Deligny exited the picture in January 1913, after a last mass for his dearly departed at the church of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul, when he sailed back to France on the SS Canada. He retired to Trouville-sur-Mer, where he was born. I know that he wrote the text for a collection of watercolors entitled Gendarmes in Guadeloupe: The Colony at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. I have been unable to find a copy of the book, but during one of my visits to my friend Letizia Galli, who lives in the apartments of Les Roches Noires, I discovered while nosing around the museum with her that a certain Antoine Deligny had worked as a guide during an exhibition of the painter Eugène Boudin, one of whose works was On the Beach at Trouville. The museum employees were both intrigued and helpful and gave me the address of the house where he had lived around 1920. I rushed over to find that it was now a pharmacy and nobody could recall anything about him.
After Antoine Deligny left for Trouville, life in La Pointe resumed its former color.
The only difference being that Victoire no longer cooked.
Not only did she no longer set foot in the little outhouse at the back, but she lost interest in everything, she who used to sniff the meat and fowl for hours, inspect the gills of the fish, and scrape the yams to judge the whiteness of their flesh.
I don’t think it was a deliberate refusal on her part. It would be difficult to imagine a writer mutilating herself and renouncing her gift on purpose. The gift of writing deserts her, leaves her devastated like the shore after a tsunami. Suddenly, sounds, images, and smells no longer secretly speak to her in a language that only she can decipher. What I mean is that if Victoire no longer cooked, it didn’t mean she was rebelling against Jeanne or against society in general. It was the consequence of the loss of her creativity, the result of an immense weariness and a pernicious feeling of what’s the use.
JEANNE WAS SO absorbed by correcting her pupils’ homework, preparing her lessons, paying visits to the Grands Nègres, worrying about decorum, and caring for her children that first of all she didn’t notice. It was Auguste who had to tell her. Hadn’t she noticed? Her mother no longer did absolutely anything. The week before, she had been unwell for the weekly reception and they had had to make do with Gastonia’s cooking. Wouldn’t the same thing happen for the next board of directors’ dinner? Shouldn’t they ask her what was worrying her?