“Alas, my happiness didn’t last. After a few months I realized she was not menstruating. She was so ignorant, she didn’t know what it meant. I had to explain it to her. Can you believe she jumped for joy, someone who didn’t care a damn about anything. A baby! A baby! For the first time, she was happy. But I was in a predicament, to tell you the truth. A baby with a bòbò! And first of all, was it my child? Despite my words of warning, Pisket had slept with a great many other men. I don’t trust those teas and decoctions women take for an abortion, so I proposed operating on her. Oh, nothing complicated. No need to be frightened. She didn’t say anything, and I took that to mean yes. Three or four days later, she disappeared.
“I can remember it as if it were yesterday.
“It was December 22, to be exact. Lights and Christmas carols in every home. The children from the Saint-Jean-Bosco orphanage had decorated a giant crèche, which they had placed in front of the high altar in the cathedral, and folk from Grande-
Anse came to admire baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the ox, and the donkey. I had gone up to her room and found it empty. She had taken all her stuff. Nobody had seen her leave. Nobody knew where she had gone.
“I wanted to die, but had little luck. I began by accusing Carmen of not keeping an eye on her. That was unfair; she had no reason to distrust Pisket, since she never set foot outdoors. One of the girls told us that the day before she had surprised her with Kung Fui near the cathedral deep in conversation with Madeska, a notorious mischief maker who was friends with a certain Madone, Pisket’s only friend. This struck her as being odd. What could she be doing with such an individual? Except for Madone, all the girls used to run and hide when he turned up. They were scared of him. What’s more, he was fat and filthy as a hog in his African boubou. Obviously Carmen didn’t have the courage to kick him out. But that didn’t tell me where Pisket had gone. Where should I look for her? On Grande-Terre in the vicinity of La Pointe? Over by Basse-Terre? Among the cane fields? On the mountain slopes? In the waterfalls or along the rivers?
“In desperation I haunted the places of ill-repute. I mounted d’Artagnan and scoured the countryside. I interrogated the rum guzzlers and players of dice, checkers, and dominoes. I visited one by one the whorehouses on the windward side of the island and dragged the whores from their beds. I lost my appetite for everything. I was a real bag of bones. Don’t laugh, I suffered like I had never suffered before. People were convinced I was working too hard and begged me to take a rest. Don’t ask me how long this hellish state lasted. I was like a drug addict in withdrawal. Then finally I snapped out of it. I conducted more and more daring experiments, endeavoring to transplant rabbit hearts into mongoose and vice versa. In particular I began a crusade against opium. I have to tell you that at the time there were as many opium poppy fields in Guadeloupe as there were cane fields. The plant had been introduced by those Asian workers come to replace the blacks in the plantations. They dried the seeds themselves from the poppy flowers.
“Old Chang, for instance, owned an opium den right in the middle of the Bélisaire district, which, by the way, was thick with Chinese. When the police had had enough, they raided the den, rounded up all the customers, and threw them in jail. After two days they had no choice but to set them free, since there was no law against smoking opium. You could count us on the fingers of one hand, those of us who protested that opium was far more dangerous than rum. I began writing columns in Le Courrier de la Côte au Vent. I worked together with a childhood friend of mine, Dieudonné Pylône, the police commissioner. I opened a small center for treating drug addicts that I called the Refuge of the Good Shepherd. In short, because of all the fuss I made, they awarded me the medal for social merit. More and more, people took me for a role model. They were so adamant I should go into politics, I ended up creating a party that I prosaically called the People’s Party. Unfortunately, I never won an election. The absurdity of my situation, I am convinced, must have stuck out like the Soufrière volcano: me a bourgeois belonging to an old family of freed coloreds, I dared to speak in the name of the slaves.
“One morning I was in my surgery, about to operate on a small boy for tonsillitis, when Carmen sent urgent word that Pisket had reappeared. I left the child laid out on the operating table and ran outside like a madman. Yes, Pisket had come back. But not the Pisket I knew! A zombie. She now smoked as many as fifty opium pipes a day and had reached the stage of bondage. She could no longer stand on her own two feet, walk, or eat, and it was Kung Fui who did everything for her. He of course had reappeared, together with his Chinese friend. Eyes wide open, at night she had hallucinations and sometimes screamed like a hog having its throat slit. At that stage, all my learning was to no effect. She gradually drifted into a state of terminal cachexia, and one morning, while I was leaning over her, the life went out of her.
“You can’t imagine what happened next. No doubt because of the opium she had consumed, her body turned rotten in next to no time. She passed away at five in the morning when dawn mass was being said. At eight, she reeked to high heaven. At noon, the stench made it impossible to remain in the house. A thick juice, as black as tar, oozed from her private parts, which liquefied, and stained the bedsheets. I had to run to the undertakers. The undertaker quickly cast a lead coffin, which he placed inside a second ironwood casket. But the smell! You can’t imagine! During the wake we had to beat off the swarms of blowflies, bigger than beetles, that settled on everything and everyone. The removal of the body was a great relief. The priest, of course, refused to give her the extreme unction. But I had a tomb built in which we buried her on Sunday, August 30, the day of Saint Fiacre. The bad talkers of Grande-Anse were not surprised to see me in deep mourning because of my work with the drug addicts. They thought I was trying to show the young people an example of what not to do. Little did they guess that the sun had set forever on my life and that I was laying my only love to rest. I envied Kung Fui, who had nothing to hide and was crying his heart out as he followed the hearse, propped up by Yang Ting — that was his name, I remember now. A nasty piece of work he was, you only had to look at him, but you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. I didn’t give him long to live either. He was already an old bag of bones, as yellow as saffron. Emaciated. Eyes dilated — red and swollen. A certain Tonine was also walking behind the coffin. They said she was Pisket’s sister. I had never seen her before. I remember she looked a lot like Pisket except for that shy, gentle expression, which Pisket never had. A few weeks later, grave robbers came and opened Pisket’s coffin and scattered her remains. All her fleshy parts had been eaten by worms. Only the skeleton was left, but broken into a thousand pieces. It was all the more surprising, since grave robbers as a rule go straight for the tombs of the white Creoles and make a beeline for the jewelry, gold necklaces, cameos, gold chokers and beads of the women, and the pocket watches, the rings, and the bracelets of the men. What did they hope to find on a wretched prostitute? And yet the biggest surprise was yet to come. One morning I got a letter from a notary in Grande-Anse informing me that Kim Lee Fui — that was Pisket’s real name — had left me and Kung Fui an inheritance. She had left a considerable sum of money in the Crédit Colonial and a laundry in her name, Le Blanc Galop. We then discovered she hadn’t gone very far. To Bélisaire. She hadn’t gone into hiding. She had opened this laundry on the ground floor of her house, where she employed not only her so-called brother and the inseparable Yang Ting, but also two Chinese and the girl called Tonine, who was the close friend of this Yang Ting. Instead of looking under my very nose, I had gone looking for her as far away as Basse-Terre. Pisket had made pots of money! I didn’t understand how she had amassed such a fortune, nor why she left me half. Obviously, I refused every penny of it and gave my share to Kung Fui, who pocketed it and vanished from Guadeloupe with Yang Ting. And no one was any the wiser.