“Ka sa yé sa?” the neighbors asked, perplexed.
Music is meant to stir the blood and deliver electric shocks to the heart, the belly, and the sex. It’s meant to stiffen your calves with pleasure and set you dancing.
Ah! The Boucolons were a funny lot!
NINETEEN
Valérie-Anne was married one Sunday in August 1914, at La Regrettée on her father-in-law’s estate in Matouba.
War had just been declared in Europe. The majority of Guadeloupeans, however, did not know or did not care. They did not know it would be so deadly and that so many of them would leave to lose their lives there.
Despite her failing health, Victoire did not hesitate for one moment. Showing initiative for the first time in her life, she did not ask Jeanne for permission to leave La Pointe. Jeanne had to accept the fait accompli when two days before the wedding, very early in the morning, the Cleveland came to pick Victoire up on the rue de Condé.
They stopped to buy gas at the Shell gas station, the only one on the island. Located in the harbor so as to refuel the first motorized boats and automobiles, it caused a sensation. Bystanders spent hours admiring the mechanized pumps and the attendants in their red and white uniforms with a shell spread across the middle of their backs. Victoire sat next to Jérémie, the chauffeur, so as to let Anne-Marie spread out her weight in the back. He spoke to her with familiarity, like someone of the same social status. Had she been following the massive strikes that had shaken the sugar industry to its core? Ah, those needy maléré who up till now had been reduced to silence with a plateful of calalu were realizing their strength. They were becoming a proletariat with a formidable force. Victoire did not know what to say. She realized to what extent she was nothing but a leftover from the old days. The modern words were “labor unions,” “strikes,” and “demands.” Jérémie told her there had been a union for domestics for some years. She should have joined. You have to defend yourself since black or white, the boss is the same. A rich mulatto is a white man. A rich black man, a mulatto. The only concern of either is to exploit the weakest.
Bewildered, Victoire was hearing this type of discourse for the first time. I wonder what she thought about it. Did she fully understand it?
Neither she nor Anne-Marie had ever gone farther than Petit Bourg when they stayed at Vernou. Very soon, they found themselves indisposed by the bumps and jolts of the automobile to pay attention to the picturesque landscape. Yet the sight was not to be missed. To the right, villages perched in the opaque green of the foothills. To the left, the blue of the ocean dotted with little white specks of foam. Soon Anne-Marie was snoring. She only woke up when they reached Dolé-les-Bains, where, because of its reputation, she insisted on having lunch.
The spa at Dolé-les-Bains was the first to attract tourists to Guadeloupe. Cubans — recognizable more than anything else by their enormous Havana cigars and bicolor leather shoes — and all sorts of Europeans, French, English, Dutch, and Swedish fought over the rooms in its five-star hotel. From the restaurant guests enjoyed an unobstructed view of the islands of Les Saintes. A sophisticated personnel, trained in Haiti, officiated. While Victoire, as usual, merely nibbled at her food, Anne-Marie ate too much. She helped herself twice to the excellent thrush pâté, the crab matété, and above all the chocolate-flavored coconut flan. Around two o’clock they resumed their journey to Basse-Terre. It was the first time either of them had set foot in the capital, since they had never paid Jeanne a visit while she was a student at Versailles. The town was cool, bourgeois, and peaceful. The authorities constantly compared it to La Pointe: “Here, there is a sense of calm,” the governors wrote. “It is crime free and trials take place without incident.”
Both women were impressed by the battalion of ships waiting offshore to be loaded, by the tamarind trees on the Cours Nolivos, and, above all, the imposing silhouette of the volcano La Soufrière in the distance. The threatening smoke from the fumaroles twirling up into the sky reminded Victoire of the Montagne Pelée and recalled in her heart the happy stay in Saint-Pierre, Martinique, which she had erased from her memory as if it were taboo. Soon, Anne-Marie complained that the air was becoming increasingly cooler as they approached Matouba and they had to stop the car and look for a shawl in the trunk. Uttering cries of fright, she was terrified when the car set off along a winding, mountainous road that threatened to be swallowed up by a dense vegetation of giant red and white dasheen leaves, breadnut trees, all sorts of palms, and the foliage of the ubiquitous lofty tree fern. Jérémie was chuckling to himself.
The estate of La Regrettée was spread over 187 acres and numbered over six hundred coffee trees, which the farm workers were beginning to cut down since coffee was no longer profitable. Bananas were said to have a promising future. If the weather had been more pleasant, the place would have been splendid. But the sky weighed low and gray. The Du Veuzits welcomed Anne-Marie effusively and accommodated her in one of the best rooms in the Great House, whereas Victoire, like Jérémie, had to be content with a bed in the former drying house, converted into a dormitory for the servants. She did not think of it as a humiliation. If she felt morose, it was not because of the ambiguous mistress-servant position, which had long ceased to bother her. It was because suddenly the landscape was so like Saint-Pierre in Martinique that she couldn’t get the memory of Alexandre out of her head. As if the past were shaking up his ashes and coming back to haunt and burn her.
The next day was bustling with activity. Victoire would have preferred to stay in the gardens at La Regrettée, where some magnificent Malabar glory lilies were growing. Instead, she had to follow the intrepid Anne-Marie, who had herself driven to the Bains Jaunes, thus named because their waters were strongly mixed with sulfur. A paved road, called the Pas-du-Roy, leading to the baths was unfit for cars but fairly easy for walkers. They had barely returned to La Regrettée when the rain that had been threatening since morning came down in fury. The wind then joined in and it was as if hordes of neighing horses were being whipped as they galloped around the Great House. This lasted the whole night long.
On the day of the wedding, the sun rose radiant.
Three hundred guests — some had come from Martinique and even Puerto Rico, where the du Veuzits had family — squeezed into the former coffee plantation house. Everyone agreed that Victoire was not looking well and seemed sad. Living with her daughter did not suit her! Not surprising! Jeanne was an ungrateful person who was now bad-mouthing religion. (Jeanne had just written that article on teaching in Trait d’Union that I have mentioned.) The nuns at Versailles had taken offense and interpreted it as an attack against their teaching methods. The guests also regretted the absence of Boniface Jr. Anticipating a fad that was later to thrive among the middle classes of Guadeloupe and Martinique, he had given as an excuse a hunting trip to the game-rich forests of Haiti that had not yet been felled by the Haitian peasants. On the other hand, everyone was touched by the young bride. Under her bonnet and veil, she looked rather like a first communicant.
“Qué linda!” the matrons of Puerto Rico exclaimed in tears.
As is always the case with weddings, it reminded them of their youth, the time of illusions when the assiduous suitor had not yet metamorphosed into a fickle husband. They got worked up, emotionally imagining an innocent and virginal Valérie-Anne, whereas the cunning little minx, taking advantage of her chaperone’s inattention, had arranged on several occasions to taste the forbidden fruit.