Island Beneath the Sea (14 page)

By order of her
maitre
, who did not tolerate hearing Maurice
parler neg
, speak like the blacks, Tete always spoke French in the house. She spoke Creole with all the others on the plantation, and with Eugenia the Spanish that was becoming reduced to a few indispensable words. The ill woman had sunk into a melancholy so persistent, and an emotional indifference so complete, that if Tete hadn't fed and washed her she would have died of hunger, filthy as a pig, and if she hadn't moved her and changed her position, her bones would have frozen in place, and if she hadn't urged her to speak, she would have been mute. She no longer suffered panic attacks but spent her days half awake, half asleep in a large chair, eyes staring ahead, like a huge doll. She still recited the rosary, which she always wore in a small leather bag she hung around her neck, even though she could no longer say the words. "When I die you will have my rosary--do not let anyone take it from you, because it is blessed by the pope," she had told Tete. In rare moments of lucidity she prayed for God to take her away. According to Tante Rose, her
ti-bon-ange
was stuck in this world and needed a special service to liberate it, nothing painful or complicated, but Tete had not decided to take such an irrevocable step. She wanted to help her hapless mistress, but responsibility for her death would be a crushing burden, even shared with Tante Rose. Perhaps Dona Eugenia's
ti-bon-ange
still needed to do something in her body; they would have to give it time to get free by itself.

Toulouse Valmorain imposed his embraces on Tete frequently, more out of habit than affection or desire, without the urgency of the period when she entered puberty and he was overcome by a sudden passion. Only Eugenia's dementia explained why she had not realized what was happening right before her eyes. "The
maitresse
suspects, but what is she going to do? She can't stop him," was the opinion of Tante Rose, the one person Tete dared confide in when she became pregnant. She had feared the reaction of her mistress when she began to notice, but before that happened, Valmorain took his wife to Cuba, where he would gladly have left her forever if the convent nuns had agreed to take care of her. When he brought her back to the plantation, Tete's baby had disappeared, and Eugenia never asked why her slave's tears were falling like little pebbles. Valmorain's sensuality was gluttonous and hurried. In bed as at the table he did not like to waste time in preliminaries--just as he was bored by the ritual of long tablecloth and silver candelabra that Eugenia had always used at dinner he found the amorous game equally useless. For Tete it was one further chore, which was fulfilled in a few minutes except on those occasions when the devil possessed her master; that did not often happen, though she always anticipated it with fear. She was grateful for her luck; Lacroix, the owner of the plantation neighboring Saint-Lazare, kept a seraglio of girls chained in a barracks to satisfy his fantasies, in which guests and a few blacks he called "my studs" participated. Valmorain had attended those cruel evenings only once, and was so profoundly affected that he never returned. He was not excessively scrupulous but he believed that sooner or later a man paid for fundamental crimes, and he did not want to be near Lacroix when it was time for him to pay his. He was Lacroix's friend, they had shared interests, from breeding animals to hiring slaves for the cane harvest; he attended his parties, his cattle roundups and cockfights, but he did not want to set foot in that barracks again. Lacroix trusted him completely, with no guarantee but with a simple signed receipt handed Valmorain his savings to deposit in Cuba in a secret account far from the greedy claws of his wife and other relatives. Valmorain had to use great tact to reject Lacroix's repeated invitations to his orgies.

Tete had learned to let herself be used with the passivity of a sheep, her body loose, not offering any resistance, while her mind and soul flew elsewhere; that way her master finished quickly and then fell into the sleep of death. She knew that alcohol was her ally if she poured it in exact measure. With one or two goblets her
maitre
became excited, with the third she had to be careful because he became violent, but with the fourth he was enveloped in a fog of intoxication, and if she delicately eluded him he fell asleep before he touched her. Valmorain never wondered what she felt in those encounters, just as it would never have occurred to him to ask what his horse felt when he rode it. He was used to her and rarely looked for other women. At times he awoke with faint distress in the empty bed that still held the nearly imperceptible mark of Tete's warm body; then he would remember his long-past nights with Violette Boisier or the love affairs of his youth in France that seemed to have happened to another man, one whose imagination was sent flying at the sight of a female ankle and who was capable of romping with renewed brio. Now that was impossible. Tete did not excite him as she once had, but it did not occur to him to replace her; he was comfortable with her, and he was a man of deeply rooted habits.

Sometimes he trapped a young slave on the fly, but that did not yield much beyond a rape as fast, and not as pleasureful, as reading a page of his current book. He attributed his lack of enthusiasm to an attack of malaria that had nearly dispatched him to the other world, leaving him weakened. Dr. Parmentier warned him about the effects of alcohol, as pernicious in the tropics as fever, but he did not drink too much, he was certain of that, only what was indispensable to palliate boredom and loneliness. He paid no account to Tete's persistence in filling his goblet. Before, when he was still traveling frequently to Le Cap, he used the occasion to divert himself with a fashionable courtesan, one of the beautiful
poules
who fired his passion but left him feeling empty. On the road he would anticipate pleasures that once consummated he could not remember, in part because during those trips he drank very heavily. He paid those girls to do the same thing he did with Tete--the same rough embrace, the same haste--and in the end he would stumble out with an impression of having been swindled. With Violette it would have been different, but once she started living with Relais, she had left the profession. Valmorain returned to Saint-Lazare earlier than planned, thinking of Maurice and eager to regain the security of his routine. "I am getting old," he muttered, studying himself in the mirror as his slave shaved him, seeing the web of fine wrinkles around his eyes and the beginning of a double chin. He was forty years old, the same age as Prosper Cambray, but he lacked his energy and was putting on weight. "That's the fault of this accursed climate," he added. He felt that his life was passing aimlessly, drifting like a ship without a rudder or compass, waiting for something he did not know how to name.

He detested the island. During the day he was kept busy around the plantation, but evenings and nights were endless. The sun set, darkness fell, and the hours began to drag by with their load of memories, fears, regrets, and ghosts. He tricked time by reading and playing cards with Tete. Those were the only moments she lowered her defenses and abandoned herself to relish of the game. When he first taught her to play, he always won, but he guessed that she was losing on purpose, afraid she would anger him. "There is no pleasure in that for me. Try to beat me," he demanded, and then began to lose consistently. He wondered with amazement how that mulatta girl could compete head to head with him in a game of logic, cleverness, and calculation. No one had taught Tete arithmetic, but she kept count of the cards by instinct, just as she did the household expenses. The possibility that she was as skilled as he perturbed and confused him.

Valmorain dined early in the dining hall, three simple but filling dishes, his main meal of the day served by two silent slaves. He drank a few goblets of good wine, the same he smuggled to his brother-in-law Sancho and sold in Cuba for twice what it cost in Saint-Domingue. After dessert Tete brought him a bottle of cognac and caught him up on domestic matters. The young woman slipped along on her bare feet as if she were floating, but he perceived the delicate tinkling of keys, the swishing of skirts, and the warmth of her presence before she entered. "Sit down, I don't like for you to talk above my head," he would say every night. She would wait for that order before taking a seat a short distance away, sitting very straight in the chair, hands in her lap, eyes lowered. In the light of the candles her harmonious face and long neck seemed carved in wood. Her elongated, sleepy-lidded eyes shone with golden reflections. She answered his questions without emphasis, except when he talked about Maurice; then she became animated, celebrating every bit of the boy's mischief as if it were a feat. "All little boys chase hens, Tete," he would say, in his heart sharing her belief that they were raising a genius. It was for that, more than anything, that Valmorain appreciated her; his son could not be in better hands. Despite himself, because he was not given to excessive pampering, he was moved when he saw them together in that complicity of caresses and secrets mothers share with their children.

Maurice returned Tete's affection with a loyalty so exclusive that his father often felt jealous. Valmorain had forbidden him to call her Maman, but Maurice disobeyed. "Maman, promise me that we will never, never be apart," he had heard his son whisper to her behind his back. "I promise, little one." Lacking anyone else to talk to, Valmorain was used to confiding his business worries, the management of the plantation and slaves, to Tete. These were not conversations, since he did not expect an answer, but monologues in which he could unburden his thoughts and hear the sound of a human voice, even if his own. At times they exchanged ideas, and to him it seemed that she did not add anything because he did not realize how she manipulated him in a few sentences.

"Did you see the merchandise Cambray brought in yesterday?"

"Yes,
maitre
. I helped Tante Rose look them over."

"And?"

"They do not look good."

"They just got here, they lose a lot of weight on the trip. Cambray bought them in a quick lot, all for the one price. That's a bad method, you can't examine them and they give you a cat for a hare; those slave traders are expert in deceitful trading. But after all, I suppose that the head overseer knows what he's doing. What does Tante Rose say?"

"Two have the runs, they can't stand on their feet. She says to leave them with her a week so she can cure them."

"A week!"

"That is better than losing them,
maitre
. That's what Tante Rose says."

"Is there a woman in the bunch? We need another woman in the kitchen."

"No, but there's a fourteen-year-old boy--"

"Is that the one Cambray flogged on the way back? He told me the boy tried to escape, and he had to teach him a lesson right there."

"That is what Monsieur Cambray says,
maitre
."

"And you, Tete, what do you think happened?"

"I do not know,
maitre
, but I think that the boy will do better in the kitchen than in the fields."

"Here in the house he will try to run away again, there isn't much oversight."

"No house slave has run away yet,
maitre
."

The dialogue was inconclusive, but later, when Valmorain was looking over his new acquisitions, he picked out the boy and made a decision.

When dinner was over, Tete would leave to see that Eugenia was clean and calm in her bed, and to be with Maurice until he went to sleep. Valmorain would settle on the gallery, if the weather permitted, or in the dark drawing room, caressing his third cognac, reading a book or a newspaper by the bad light of an oil lamp. The news arrived weeks late, but that didn't matter to him; all the events occurred in a different universe. He would dismiss the domestic servants, because at the end of the day he was already bored by their divining his thought, and sit reading alone. Later, when the sky was an impenetrable black cloak and all he could hear was the eternal whistling of the cane, the whispers of the shadows inside the house, and, sometimes, the secret vibration of distant drums, he would go to his room and take off his clothes by the light of a single candle. Tete would come soon.

Zarite

T
his is how I remember it. Outside, crickets and the hooting of an owl, inside, the moon illuminating with precise stripes the sleeping body. So young! Watch over him for me, Erzulie
, loa
of deepest waters, I would ask, rubbing my doll, the one my grandfather Honore gave me and that was still my companion. Come, Erzulie, mother, beloved, with your necklaces of pure gold, your cape of toucan feathers, your crown of flowers, and your three rings, one for each husband. Help us
, loa
of dreams and hopes. Protect him from Cambray, make him invisible to the master's eyes, make him cautious before others but proud in my arms, quiet his African heart in the light of day so that he may survive, and instill courage in him by night so that he not lose his wish for freedom. Look upon us with benevolence, Erzulie
, loa
of jealousy. Do not envy us, because this happiness is as fragile as the wings of a fly. He will go. If he does not, he will die, you know that, but do not take him from me quite yet, let me stroke the slim boy's back before it becomes a man's.

He was a warrior, this love of mine, like the name his father gave him
:
Gambo, which means warrior. I whispered his forbidden name when we were alone. Gambo...and that word resonated through my veins. It cost him many beatings to answer to the name they gave him here, and to hide his true name. Gambo, he said to me, touching his chest the first time we made love. Gambo, Gambo, he repeated until I dared say it to him. Then he spoke to me in his language, and I answered in mine. It took a while for him to learn Creole and to teach me something of his tongue, the one my mother was not able to give me, but from the beginning we did not need to talk. Love has mute words, more transparent than the river. Then Gambo had just arrived, he looked like a child, he was nothing but bones, frightened. Other larger and stronger captives had been left floating in the bitter sea, looking for the current that flowed toward Guinea. How did he endure the crossing? He came with his flesh raw from lashings, Cambray's method for breaking in new slaves, the same he used with dogs and horses. On his chest, over his heart, was a red burn bearing the initials of the slave trade company put on him in Africa before embarking and still had not healed. Tante Rose told me to wash the wounds with water, a lot of water, and to cover them with poultices of a Moorish herb, aloe, and lard. They had to close from inside out. On the burn, no water, only fat. No one knew how to cure like she did, even Dr. Parmentier wanted to know her secrets and she gave them to him, though they were used to help other whites, because knowledge comes from Papa Bondye and it belongs to everyone, and if not shared it is lost. And that is so. Those days she was occupied with the slaves who arrived sick, so it fell to me to treat Gambo.