Island Beneath the Sea (15 page)

The first time I saw him he was lying facedown in the slave hospital, covered with flies. With difficulty I helped him sit up and gave him a sip of
taffia
and a small spoonful of the
maitresse
's drops I had stolen from her blue vial. Then I began the unpleasant task of cleaning him up. The wounds were not too badly inflamed, for Cambray had not been able to douse them with salt and vinegar, but the pain must have been terrible. Gambo bit his lips, not complaining. After he was clean, I sat down beside him to sing to him, since I didn't know any words of consolation in his language. I wanted to explain to him how to behave in order not to provoke the hand that held the whip, how he should work and obey while his vengeance was growing, that fire that smolders inside. My godmother convinced Cambray that the boy had the plague and that it was best to leave him alone so he wouldn't give it to the rest of the crew. The overseer gave her permission to take him to her cabin because he never lost hope that Tante Rose would contract some fatal fever
;
she was immune, however, she had a deal with Legba, the
loa
of sorcery. In the meantime I began to put in my
maitre
's head the idea of assigning Gambo to the kitchen. He would never last in the cane fields because the overseer had had his eye on him from the beginning. Tante Rose left us alone in her cabin during treatments. She guessed. And the fourth day it happened. Gambo was so foggy from pain, and from everything he'd lost--his land, his family, his freedom--that I wanted to put my arms around him as his mother would have done. Affection is good for healing. One touching led to another, and I found myself sliding down, not touching his shoulders, so he could rest his head on my breast. His body was burning, he still had a lot of fever, I don't think he knew what we were doing. I didn't know love. What the master did with me was dark and shameful, that is what I told Gambo, but he didn't believe me. With my
maitre,
my soul, my
ti-bon-ange,
let go and went flying elsewhere and only my
corps-cadavre
lay in that bed. Gambo. His light body on mine, his hands at my waist, his breath on my lips, his eyes looking at me from the other side of the sea, from Guinea, that was love. Erzulie
, loa
of love, save him from all things bad, protect him. That was my supplication.

Turbulent Times

M
ore than thirty years had gone by since Macandal, that legendary sorcerer, planted the seed of insurrection, and since then his spirit had traveled with the wind from one end of the island to the other, infiltrating slave quarters, cabins,
ajoupas
, mills, and tempting slaves with the promise of freedom. He adopted the form of a serpent, a beetle, a monkey, a macaw, he blended with the whisper of the rain, he clamored with the thunder, he incited rebellion with the howl of the storm. Whites sensed him too. Every slave was an enemy, and there were already more than half a million of them, two-thirds of whom came directly from Africa bearing their enormous load of resentment and living only to burst their chains and reap revenge. Thousands of slaves arrived in Saint-Domingue, but never enough to fill the insatiable demands of the planters. Whip, hunger, work. Neither vigilance nor the most brutal repression kept many from escaping; some managed to do that in the port, as soon as they were unloaded and their chains removed to be baptized. They ran off naked and sick, with one thought: get away from the whites. They crossed plains, crawling through pasturelands, they plunged into jungle and climbed the mountains of that unfamiliar territory. If they succeeded in joining a band of Maroons, they were saved from slavery. War, freedom. The
bozales
, born free in Africa and ready to die to be free once again, infected those born on the island with courage, the ones who had never known freedom and who knew Guinea as a hazy kingdom at the bottom of the sea. The planters lived armed, waiting. The Regiment Le Cap had been reinforced with four thousand French soldiers who barely touched terra firma before they dropped, struck by cholera, malaria, and dysentery. The slaves believed that mosquitoes, the cause of that death toll, were Macandal's armies battling against the whites. Macandal had freed himself from the fire of the stake and metamorphosed into a mosquito. Macandal had returned, as he promised. In Saint-Lazare fewer slaves had fled than in other places, and Valmorain attributed it to the fact that he did not vent his cruelty on his Negroes, none of that coating them with molasses and exposing them to red ants, as Lacroix did. In his strange nightly monologues he would comment to Tete that no one could accuse him of cruelty, but if the situation continued to grow worse he would have to give Cambray carte blanche. She was careful not to mention the word
insurgency
in his presence. Tante Rose had assured her that a general uprising of slaves was only a question of time, and that Saint-Lazare, like all the other plantations on the island, was going to disappear in flames.

Prosper Cambray had commented on that improbable rumor with his employer. Ever since he was able to remember the talk had been the same, and never came to anything. What could miserable slaves do against the militia and men like him, resolute in all things? How would they organize and arm themselves? Who was going to lead them? Impossible. He spent the day on horseback and slept with two pistols within reach of his hand, one eye open, always on guard. The whip was an extension of his fist, the language most known and feared by all; nothing pleased him as much as the fear he inspired. Only his employer's scruples had kept him from using more imaginative methods of repression, but that was about to change, the bursts of insurrection had multiplied. The opportunity had come for him to demonstrate that he could manage the plantation under the worst conditions. He had been waiting too many years to be given the position of manager. He couldn't complain, because in the meantime he'd amassed a not inconsequential amount of money through bribes, petty thievery, and smuggling. Valmorain never suspected how much disappeared from his storage rooms. Cambray boasted of being a bull with the slave girls; none escaped serving him in his hammock and no one interfered. As long as he did not molest Tete he could fornicate at will, but because she was out of his reach she was the only one who fired him with lust and rage. He watched her from a distance, spied on her from nearby, trapped her at some careless moment, but she always wriggled away. "Be careful, Monsieur Cambray. If you touch me, I will tell the master," Tete would warn him, trying to control the tremble in her voice. "
You
be careful, whore, because when I get my hands on you, you are going to pay. Who do you think you are, wretch? You are already twenty; soon now your master is going to replace you with another, younger girl and then it will be my turn. I am going to buy you. Your master will be happy to sell you," he threatened, playing with his braided leather whip.

Meanwhile, the French Revolution had hit the colony like the slash of a dragon's tail, shaking it to its foundation. The
grands blancs
, conservatives and monarchists, looked upon the changes with horror, but the
petits blancs
supported the republic, which had done away with differences among classes:
liberte, egalite, fraternite
for whites. As for the
affranchis
, they had sent delegations to Paris to negotiate their right to citizenship before the Assemblee Nationale, because in Saint-Domingue no white, rich or poor, was disposed to give that to them. Valmorain indefinitely postponed his return to France because he realized that there was now nothing that tied him to his country. Once he had raged about the monarchy's profligate ways, and now he complained about the disarray of the republic. After so many years of not fitting into the colony, he had ended by accepting that his place was in the New World. Sancho Garcia del Solar wrote him with his usual candor to propose that he forget about Europe in general and France in particular; there was no place there for enterprising men, the future lay in Louisiana. He had good connections in New Orleans, and all he lacked was capital to launch a project several people were already interested in; he wanted, however, to give preference to Valmorain because of family ties and because when they both put their fingers on something gold burst from it. He explained to Valmorain that in its beginnings Louisiana had been a French colony and for some twenty years had belonged to Spain, but the population was obstinately loyal to its origins. The government was Spanish, but the culture and language continued to be French. The climate was similar to that in the Antilles, and the crops were the same, with the advantage that there was much more space and land was cheap; they could acquire a large plantation and exploit it without political problems or rebelling slaves. They would make a fortune in only a few years, he promised.

After losing her first child, Tete had wanted to be as sterile as the mules in the mill. For her to love and suffer as a mother, Maurice was enough, that delicate child capable of weeping with emotion over music or wetting himself in anguish when he witnessed cruelty. He was afraid of Cambray; he had only to hear the click of his boot heels in the gallery to run and hide. Tete relied on Tante Rose's remedies to keep from getting pregnant again, as other slaves did, but they were not always effective. The healer said that some children insisted on coming into the world because they could not suspect what was waiting for them. That was how it was with Tete's second pregnancy. The handfuls of fiber soaked in vinegar did nothing to prevent it, nor the infusions of pine needles, the burning mustard, or the rooster sacrificed to the
loas
to abort it. After the third moon without menstruating, she went to beg her godmother to end her problem with a sharp stick, but she refused; the risk of infection was enormous, and if they were caught attempting anything against the master's property, Cambray would have the perfect motive to flay them with his whip.

"I suppose this one is the master's too," commented Tante Rose.

"I'm not sure,
marraine
. It might be Gambo's," Tete murmured, alarmed.

"Whose?"

"The helper in the kitchen. His real name is Gambo."

"He's a young boy, but I see that he already knows how to do as men do. He must be five or six years younger than you."

"What does that matter? What matters is that if the baby comes out black, my
maitre
will kill both of us!"

"Children with mixed blood often come out dark as their grandparents," Tante Rose assured her.

Terrified at the possible consequences of her pregnancy, Tete thought of it as a tumor, but at the fourth month she felt the flutter of a dove's wing, an obstinate breath, the first unmistakable manifestation of life, and she could not avoid the affection and compassion she felt for the being curled in her womb. At night, lying beside Maurice, she asked forgiveness in whispers for the terrible offense of bringing a child into the world as a slave. This time it was not necessary to hide her belly, nor did her master shoot off with his wife to Cuba, because the poor woman no longer noticed anything. It had been a long time since Eugenia had contact with her husband, and the few times she glimpsed him in the hazy atmosphere of her madness she asked who that man was. Neither did she recognize Maurice. In her good moments she returned to her adolescence; she was fourteen, and while waiting at breakfast for her thick hot chocolate was playing with other noisy schoolgirls in the nuns' convent in Madrid. The rest of the time she wandered in a misty landscape that had no precise outlines, a place where she no longer suffered as she once had. Tete decided on her own to suppress her opium, and there was no change in Eugenia's behavior. According to Tante Rose, her mistress had fulfilled her mission when she gave birth to Maurice, and there was nothing left for her to do in this world.

Valmorain knew Tete's body better than he had come to know Eugenia's, or any of his transitory lovers', and soon he noticed that she was getting larger around the waist and that her breasts were swelling. He asked her when they were in bed, after one of those mountings she bore with resignation and that were for him merely a nostalgic unburdening, and Tete burst into tears. That surprised him because he had not seen her spill a tear since the time they took her first son from her. He had heard that Negroes have more capacity for suffering; the proof was that no white could bear what the blacks endured, and just as they take pups from bitches, or calves from cows, they were able to separate the slaves from their children; in a short while they recovered from the loss and later did not even remember. He had never thought about Tete's sentiments; he assumed they were very limited. In her absence she dissolved, she was erased, she was suspended in nothingness until he needed her, then she materialized again. She existed only to serve him. She wasn't a girl anymore, but it seemed to him she hadn't changed. He vaguely remembered the skinny little girl he had picked up from Violette Boisier years before, the blossoming adolescent who emerged from such an unpromising chrysalis, the one he deflowered in one burst in the same room where Eugenia slept sedated, the young girl who gave birth without a single moan, biting on a piece of wood, the sixteen-year-old mother who with a kiss on the forehead said good-bye to a baby she would never see again, the woman who rocked Maurice with infinite tenderness, the one who closed her eyes and bit her lips when he penetrated her, the one who sometimes slept at his side, exhausted by the fatigues of the day, but sprang awake with Maurice's name on her lips and ran to see to him. All these images of Tete fused into one, as if time had not passed for her. That night when he felt the changes in her body, he ordered her to light the lamp, so he could look at her. He liked what he saw, that body with long firm lines, the bronze skin, the generous hips and sensual lips, and concluded that Tete was his most valuable possession. With a finger he wiped a tear that was sliding down beside her nose and without thinking touched it to his lips. It was salty, like those of Maurice.