Island Beneath the Sea (12 page)

"How is madame?" Valmorain asked.

"Tranquil,
maitre
," she replied, and stepped back to leave.

"Wait, Tete. Let's see if you can help us resolve a doubt. Dr. Parmentier maintains that blacks are as human as whites, and I say the contrary. What do you believe?" Valmorain asked in a tone that to the doctor sounded more paternal than sarcastic.

She said nothing, her eyes on the floor and her hands clasped.

"Come, Tete, answer, don't be afraid. I'm waiting..."

"The
maitre
is always right," she murmured finally.

"Or, that is, you believe that Negroes are not completely human."

"A being who is not human has no opinions,
maitre
."

Dr. Parmentier could not contain a spontaneous guffaw, and Toulouse Valmorain, after a moment's hesitation, laughed too. With a wave he dismissed the slave, who faded into the shadow.

Zarite

T
he next day in the middle of the afternoon Dona Eugenia gave birth. It was quick, although she did nothing to help up to the last moment. The doctor was at her side, watching from a chair, because catching babies is not a thing for a man to do, as he himself told us.
Maitre
Valmorain believed that a doctor's license with a royal seal was worth more than experience, and he did not want to call Tante Rose, the best midwife in the north part of the island
;
even white women called on her when their time came. I held my maitresse, I kept her cool, I prayed with her in Spanish, and I gave her the miraculous water she'd been sent from Cuba. The doctor could clearly hear the baby's heartbeats, it was ready to be born, but Dona Eugenia refused to help. I explained that my
maitresse
was going to give birth to a zombie and that Baron Samedi had come to take it away with him, and the doctor burst out laughing with such gusto that tears ran down his cheeks. That white man had been studying voodoo for years. He knew that Baron Samedi is the servant and associate of Ghede
, loa
of the world of the dead. I don't know what he found so amusing. "What a grotesque idea! I do not see any baron!" The baron does not show himself to those who do not respect him. Soon he understood that the matter was not amusing, because Dona Eugenia was so agitated. He sent me to look for Tante Rose. I found my master in a chair in the drawing room, fallen asleep after several glasses of cognac
;
he authorized me to call my godmother, and I flew out to look for her. She was waiting for me, all ready, wearing her white ceremonial gown and her necklaces, and carrying her pouch and the
asson.
She went to the big house without a question, up to the gallery, and entered through the door for the slaves. To reach Dona Eugenia's room she had to pass through the drawing room, and the thudding of her walking stick on the floorboards woke the master. "Be careful what you do to madame
,"
he warned her in a hoarse voice, but she paid no attention and continued onward, feeling her way down the corridor till she came to the room where she had often come to attend Dona Eugenia. This time she had not come as a healer, but as a
mambo;
she had come to confront the associate of Death.

From the doorway Tante Rose saw Baron Samedi, and a shudder ran down her spine, but she did not retreat. She greeted him with a bow, shaking the
asson
with its clinking of little bones, and asked permission to go to the bed. The
loa
of cemeteries and crossroads, with his white skull face and black hat, moved aside, inviting her to approach Dona Eugenia, who was gasping like a fish, wet with sweat, her eyes red with terror, fighting against her body, which was struggling to cast out the baby while she was using all her strength to hold it in. Tante Rose placed one of her seed and shell necklaces around my mistress's neck and spoke a few words of consolation to her, which I repeated in Spanish. Then she turned toward the baron.

Dr. Parmentier was watching with fascination, although he saw only Tante Rose's part, while I saw everything. My godmother lighted a cigar and waved it around, filling the air with a smoke that made it difficult to breathe because the window was always closed to prevent mosquitoes from coming in. Then she drew a chalk circle around the bed and whirled in a few dance steps, pointing to the four corners of the room with the
asson.
Once her greeting to the spirits was concluded, she made an altar out of several sacred objects she took from her pouch and then placed offerings of rum and little stones on it. Lastly she sat at the foot of the bed, ready to negotiate with the baron. The two of them became immersed in a long exchange in Creole so fast and incomprehensible that I understood little of it, though several times I heard Seraphine's name. They argued, they grew angry, they laughed, she smoked the cigar and blew out smoke that he swallowed in big mouthfuls. That continued for quite a while, and Dr. Parmentier began to lose patience. He tried to open the window, but it had been shut for so long it was stuck. Coughing and teary from the smoke, he took Dona Eugenia's pulse as if he didn't know that babies emerge far below the pulse in the wrist.

Finally Tante Rose and the baron reached an agreement. She went to the door and with a profound bow showed the
loa
out, who left making his little froglike hops. Then Tante Rose explained the situation to my mistress
:
what she had in her womb was not cemetery meat but a normal baby that Baron Samedi would not take away. Dona Eugenia stopped arguing and concentrated on pushing with all her might, and soon a gush of yellow liquid and blood stained the sheets. When the head of the baby appeared, my godmother took it gently and helped the body out. She handed me the newborn child and announced that it was a little boy, but the mother did not even want to look at it
;
she turned her face to the wall and closed her eyes, exhausted. I pressed the baby to my chest, holding it tight because it was covered with something lardy and slippery. I was absolutely sure that it would be up to me to love this child as if it were my own, and now, after all these years and all that love, I know that I was not mistaken. I wept.

Tante Rose waited until my mistress expelled what was left inside her and cleaned her up
;
then with one swallow she drank the rum offering on the altar, put her belongings back into her pouch, and left the room, clutching her walking stick as all the while the doctor was rapidly writing in his notebook. I kept weeping as I washed the baby, who was as light as a kitten. I wrapped him in the little blanket I had knitted during my afternoons in the gallery and carried him to his father so he would know him, but my master had so much cognac in his body I couldn't wake him. In the corridor a slave with swollen breasts was waiting, recently bathed, her head shaved for lice
;
she would give her milk to the son of the masters in the big house, while her baby was given rice water in the Negro quarters. No white woman nursed her children
;
that's what I thought then. The woman sat down on the floor, legs crossed, opened her blouse, and took the little one, who fastened himself to her breast. I felt that my skin was burning and my nipples hardened
;
my body was ready for that baby boy.

At that same hour, in Tante Rose's cabin, Seraphine died alone, unaware because she was sleeping. This is how it was.

The Concubine

T
hey named the boy Maurice. His father was shaken to his boots by that unexpected gift from heaven, which had come to combat his loneliness and stir his ambition. That child was going to carry on the Valmorain dynasty. The master declared a feast day; no one on the plantation worked. He had a number of animals roasted, and assigned three helpers to Tante Mathilde so there would be no shortage of spicy corn dishes and vegetables and cakes for everyone. He gave permission to have a
kalenda
in the main patio in front of the big house, which soon filled with a noisy crowd. The slaves adorned themselves with what little they had--a colored rag, a necklace of shells, a flower. They brought their drums and other improvised instruments, and after a bit there was music and people were dancing under the mocking gaze of Cambray. The master had two barrels of
taffia
distributed, and every slave received a generous dose in his gourd for a toast. Tete appeared in the gallery with the baby wrapped in a mantilla, and the father took him and lifted him over his head to show to the slaves. "This is my heir! He will be called Maurice Valmorain, that is my father's name!" he exclaimed, hoarse with emotion and still hungover from his drunkenness the night before. A silence like the depths of the sea greeted his words. Even Cambray was startled. This ignorant white man had committed the incredible blunder of giving his son the name of a deceased grandfather, who on being summoned could rise from his grave and kidnap his grandson and take him back with him to the world of the dead. Valmorain believed that the silence was respect, and ordered a second round of
taffia
and a continuation of the rejoicing. Tete took back the newborn and rushed away with him, sprinkling his face with a rain of saliva to protect him from the disgrace invoked by his father's rashness.

The next day, when the domestic slaves had cleaned the refuse from the patio and the others had gone back to the cane fields, Dr. Parmentier quickly prepared to go back to the city. Little Maurice was suckling like a calf at his wet nurse's breast, and Eugenia was showing no symptoms of fatal womb fever. Tete had rubbed her breasts with a mixture of honey and butter and bandaged them with a red cloth, Tante Rose's method for drying up milk before it began to flow. On Eugenia's night table she lined up the vials of drops for sleep, the cachets for pain, and syrups for enduring fear, not to heal her, as the doctor himself admitted, but to ease her existence. The Spanish woman was a shadow of ashen skin and ravaged face, more from tincture of opium than from her deranged mind. Maurice had suffered the effects of the drug in his mother's womb, the physician explained to Valmorain, which was why he had been born so small and frail; he would be sickly and needed air, sun, and good nourishment. He ordered them to give three raw eggs a day to the wet nurse to fortify her milk. "Now your mistress and the baby are both in your care, Tete. They could not be in better hands," he added. Toulouse Valmorain paid the doctor generously for his services and bade him farewell with regret, for he truly esteemed the cultivated, good-natured man with whom he had enjoyed countless card games in the long evenings of Saint-Lazare. He would miss the conversations with him, especially those in which they were not in agreement, because that forced him to exercise the forgotten art of arguing for pleasure. He chose two armed commandeurs to accompany the physician to Le Cap.

Parmentier was packing, a task he did not delegate to slaves, being very meticulous about his possessions, when Tete rapped discreetly at his door and asked in a thread of a voice if she might have a word with him in private. Parmentier had been with her often; he used her to communicate with Eugenia, who seemed to have forgotten her French, and with the slaves, especially Tante Rose. "You are a very good nurse, Tete, but do not treat your mistress like an invalid, she has to learn to take care of herself," he advised her when he saw her spooning pap into Eugenia's mouth and learned that Tete set her on the chamber pot and wiped her nether regions so she would not soil herself when she stood up. The girl always answered his questions with precision, in correct French, but she never initiated a dialogue or looked him in the eye, which had allowed him to observe her at his pleasure. She must be about seventeen, he thought, though her body was more like that of a woman than an adolescent. Valmorain had told him Tete's story on one of the hunting trips they made together. He knew that the slave's mother had been pregnant when she arrived at the island and was bought by an
affranchi
, a man who had a horse trade in Le Cap. The woman attempted to provoke a miscarriage, but what she got were more lashes than anyone else in her state could have borne; the little one in her womb, however, was tenacious and in due time was born healthy. As soon as the mother could stand, she tried to smash the baby's head against the floor, but she was grabbed from her in time. Another slave took care of the newborn child for several weeks, until their owner decided to use her to pay a gambling debt to a French official named Pascal, but the mother never learned of it because she had thrown herself into the ocean from a cliff. Valmorain told Parmentier that he had bought Tete to be a personal maid for his wife and had come out well rewarded, as the girl had become both nurse and housekeeper. Apparently now she would also be Maurice's nursemaid.

"What is it, Tete?" the doctor asked, as he carefully placed his valuable silver and bronze instruments into a polished wood case.

She closed the door, and with a minimum of words and no expression on her face, told him she had a son a little more than a year old, whom she had seen for an instant when he was born. Parmentier thought her voice was breaking, but when she continued, explaining that she had the baby while her mistress was resting in a convent in Cuba, she spoke in the same neutral tone as before.

"My
maitre
has forbidden me to mention the child. Dona Eugenia knows nothing about it," Tete concluded.

"Monsieur Valmorain did the right thing. His wife had not been able to have children and was very upset when she saw them. Does anyone know about your baby?"

"Only Tante Rose. I think the head overseer, Monsieur Cambray, suspects but has not been able to confirm it."

"Now that madame has her own baby, the situation has changed. Surely your master will want you to get your child back, Tete. After all, it is his property, no?" Parmentier commented.