Elissa was deep down a town dweller. She only put up with the island of Fajoux because of the sun’s burst of laughter over the sea. She immediately hated this darkness, this dankness, this jail of foliage. However hard you craned your head, you could never see the sky, barricaded by devil trees, candlewood trees, and immortelles, in turn gnawed by the leaf of life creeper and the wild pineapple. Celanire had reserved a room with a woman she claimed to have known in Basse-Terre, a certain widow Poirier, whose husband had been lost at sea two seasons earlier, and who had done the cleaning at the bishop’s palace. She was a handsome woman with teeth of pearl, and her verve was quite out of place in such surroundings. She told Celanire that some of the village women were waiting for her at the church. So without even opening their wicker baskets, Celanire dragged Elissa off down the main street — if we can attribute such a name to a path of beaten earth, a sort of forest track, which after winding a few yards among the guinea grass disappeared farther up. The huts along the way were all identical, a jumble of corrugated iron and wooden planks that looked as though they had been thrown together haphazardly. A group of poorly dressed women, as black as the charcoal they were selling, passionately kissed Celanire’s hands and dragged her inside the church. Elissa remained outside, waiting for them. Religion was a constant bone of contention between the two friends. Elissa, who had read all the philosophers, especially Voltaire, professed to be a free thinker, whereas Celanire firmly believed not exactly in the Good Lord and his saints but rather in Satan, evil, and the invisible spirits. She even went so far as to claim they were constantly present in her dreams. Celanire and the women finally emerged. Then one of them took the lead and led the group along the path to the little cemetery under a grove of casuarinas. No mausoleums or family vaults here. A series of humble graves at ground level, mounds of earth edged with conch shells and marked here and there with a cross.
One of them bore these words in crude letters:
Here lies a saint
Sister Tonine
?–1905
What the Women Told Celanire
Nobody could say why God had chosen Sister Tonine as a recipient of His greater glory; sometimes He reveals himself in mysterious ways in the most humble, the most destitute of His creatures. Illiterate. Wretched. Licked by life.
Nobody remembers exactly the year she came to live in Ravine-Vilaine. She arrived unannounced and slipped into a wattle hut whose owner had died the year before and left vacant. She had no means of her own to build a home. She had roamed around for years. She had been out in the rain during the rainy season and exposed to the sun during the dry season. It was the birds who first signaled her presence. They flocked out of the woods, obscuring the sky with their feathers — wood pigeons, turtledoves, hummingbirds, sugar tits, and ortolans. Seagulls and cormorants also flew in from the ocean, carrying on their wings the smell of the sea. All of them settled on the roof of her hut like heralds bearing good tidings. Then the children came flocking in, the tiny tots crawling on all fours. Then the women. Finally, slower than the rest, the men — especially unsociable and suspicious because of the climate and hard labor they are sentenced to if they don’t want to starve to death. And yet they too ended up adopting Sister Tonine. They squabbled over who would bring her dasheen or yams from their vegetable patch, an agouti or a wild pig they had trapped. The reason for this infatuation was that you couldn’t help loving the dear little woman. In her shapeless blue dress she was no taller or bigger than a ten-year-old. Black? Indian? Chinese? Rather a mixture of all three. Looking somewhat cracked, like those who have suffered no reprieve from life. In fact Sister Tonine sometimes sighed that the story of her life would break the heart of rocks, but she wouldn’t say any more.
The years went by in a never-changing routine. Every morning she would sing with the children. In the afternoon she visited the sick and the bedridden, describing to the dying the wonders that awaited them. Then back home she would recite prayers or sing hymns with the women. She only stopped at nightfall, when she would begin to talk of God and the afterlife. No visions of the apocalypse or torrents of imprecations, but sweet-sounding words that compensated for our daily lot of suffering on this earth. Men and women alike never tired of listening to her depict the Garden of Eden planted with the tree of life in the very middle, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, surrounded by a tangle of oleander and all sorts of sweet-smelling flowers. Every Maundy Thursday in the afternoon her torture began. On Good Friday, as she lay on her cot, the stigmata dug into her hands and feet, the wound pierced her left side, and the the crown of thorns lacerated her forehead with blood. She sweated, doubled up in pain, and sobbed all day Easter Saturday racked by unspeakable suffering. Then on Easter Sunday she would rise up like our Lord Jesus Christ and, haggard and drawn from the pain, go and kneel outside to start singing the Veni Creator.
This happened Holy Week after Holy Week. After several years the prodigy came to the ears of folk from the neighboring villages of Saint-Esprit, Maraudeur, and Vieux-Habitants. They would begin flocking to Ravine-Vilaine on Palm Sunday, sleeping under the trees in the surrounding woods. On Easter Sunday they would file back home in a procession chanting hymns to the glory of God. One year, Sister Tonine began to perform miracles. It started with Madame Eudoxie, the doctor’s wife from Saint-Esprit, whose novenas and husband’s know-how had never been able to produce a child during their twelve years of marriage. On Easter Saturday Madame Eudoxie wiped the sweat from Sister Tonine’s brow, begging her to inter-cede with the Almighty on her behalf, and one month later she missed her period. Nine months later she gave birth to a baby boy. The miracles continued with Madame Patient, the tax collector’s wife from Cantilène, who gave birth to twins on the eve of her menopause. Soon there was a crush of well-to-do women who came looking for a cure for infertility, since this class of women is more susceptible to this kind of affliction.
Sister Tonine had but one enemy, the priest at Saint-Esprit who came up to say mass at Ravine-Vilaine on Sundays at eleven. In his words, a creature who claims to imitate the Son of God and openly flaunt His stigmata is guilty of the sin of pride. Sister Tonine was a dangerous crackpot. Suspicious, he launched an investigation and came up with quite a few revelations. According to him, Sister Tonine was born at the other end of the island in the region of Port-Louis, which swarmed with mixed-bloods of every color as a result of the encounter of the three races of Europe, Africa, and Asia in the cane fields. While she was still a suckling, her parents had left her on the steps of the church, together with her brothers and sisters, and hung a sign around her neck with her name on it. Apparently the parents must have been Chinese or Indian, with a good deal of black blood, given the color of their offspring. Since the name wasn’t Christian, the priest at Port-Louis baptized her before taking her to the orphanage. Tonine excelled by her good behavior, learning her catechism by heart and abiding by God’s commandments. She served as an apprentice, then left for La Pointe. Then things took a turn for the worse. She met a shady character, a good-for-nothing, and from then on spent most of her time visiting him in jail. She followed him to Basse-Terre, where he must have been mixed up in some dirty business, and there it seems she had a baby girl who died at birth. She must have already been mentally deranged at this point, for she had trouble getting over the incident, which was certainly painful but nothing unusual in a place where hygiene left much to be desired and there was no neonatal medicine. She remained convinced that the child was alive, adopted by a well-to-do family, and insisted on getting her back. In fact, she saw the child everywhere. The priest managed to interrogate Dr. Médéric who on several occasions had treated her in his paupers’ ward at the Sainte-Hyacinthe hospital. Breaking the Hippocratic oath, the doctor told him he believed Tonine was suffering from Kirschenfeld’s disease, an ailment with symptoms of obsessions, hallucinations, fainting fits, and rashes. Armed with this information, the priest of Saint-Esprit didn’t require much more to gaily conclude that Sister Tonine was mad! He sent a report to the bishop, asking him to intervene. In a diocese like Guadeloupe there are so many problems to handle that the letter remained unanswered. So he took justice into his own hands and thundered against the poor woman from his pulpit. He showered her with contempt, heaping on insult to injury to such an extent that the villagers of Ravine-Vilaine revolted. They in turn wrote to the bishop and didn’t desist until Bishop Chabot dispatched the undesirable individual to France to purge his venom.