Island Beneath the Sea (25 page)

"And what if the rebels run into them before they reach Le Cap?"

"I have done my part, I got them away from the plantation alive. Now let them manage alone. We will be going to Toussaint's camp. His
z'etoile
is the most brilliant in the sky."

"And Rosette?"

"She comes with us, if you want."

"I can't do it, Gambo, I have to go with the white man. Forgive me," she whispered, doubled over with sorrow.

The youth pushed her away, incredulous. She had to repeat it twice for him to comprehend the firmness of that decision, the only possible one, because among the rebels Rosette would be a miserable, light-skinned quadroon, rejected, hungry, exposed to the hazards of the revolution, whereas with Valmorain she would be safer. She explained to Gambo that she could not leave the children but he did not listen to her arguments; all he heard was that Zarite preferred the white man.

"And freedom. Doesn't that matter to you?" He grabbed her shoulders and shook her.

"I am free, Gambo. I have the paper in this little bag, written and sealed. Rosette and I are free. I will keep serving the master for a time, until the war ends, and then I will go with you wherever you want."

They separated on the plain. Gambo took charge of all the pistols, turned his back on them, and disappeared, running toward thick growth, without saying good-bye and without turning to take a last look at them, to prevent succumbing to the powerful temptation to kill Valmorain and his son. He would have done that without hesitation, but he knew that if he harmed Maurice he lost Tete forever.

Valmorain, the woman, and the children reached the road, a strip wide enough for three horses, very exposed should they meet rebel blacks or mulattoes incensed against the whites. Valmorain could not take another step on his raw feet; he dragged along, moaning, followed by Maurice, who was crying with him. Tete found shade beneath some shrubs, gave the last mouthful of the provisions to Maurice, and explained that she would be back to get him but it might be a long time and he must have courage. She kissed him, put him beside his father, and started along the road with Rosette on her back. From then on it was all a matter of luck.

The sun fell like lead on her uncovered head. The terrain, of a depressing monotony, was dotted with stone outcroppings and low shrubs bent by the force of the wind and covered by a heavy, dry grass, short and tough. The soil was arid and grainy. There was no water anywhere. That road, well traveled in normal times, had since the rebellion been used only by the army and the
marechaussee
. Tete had a vague idea of the distance, but she could not calculate how many hours she would have to walk to reach the fort near Le Cap; she had always made the trip in Valmorain's coach.
Erzulie
, loa
of hope, do not forsake me.
She walked with determination, not thinking about how far she had to go but how far she had come. The landscape was desolate, there were no landmarks, everything was the same, she was nailed in the same spot, as in a nightmare. Rosette was clamoring for water, her lips dry and her eyes glassy. She gave her more drops from the blue vial and rocked her until she fell asleep and they could go on.

She walked three or four hours without pause, her mind a blank.
Water, I can't go on without water.
One step, another step, another.
Erzulie
, loa
of fresh and salt water, do not kill us with thirst
. Her legs were moving on their own, she heard drums: the call of the
boula
, the counterpoint of the
seconde
, the deep sigh of the
maman
breaking the rhythm, the other drums beginning again, variations, subtleties, leaps, suddenly the happy sound of the maracas and again invisible hands beating the taut skin of the drums. The sound filled her inside, and she began to move with the music. Another hour. She was floating in an incandescent space. Always more unconnected, she no longer felt the battering on her bones or the rattling of stones in her head. One step more, one hour more.
Erzulie
, loa
of compassion, come to my aid.
Suddenly, as her knees were doubling, a flashing current shook her from her cranium to her feet; fire, ice, wind, silence. And then came the goddess Erzulie like a powerful burst of wind and mounted Zarite, her servant.

Etienne Relais was the first to see her because he was at the head of his squad of cavalry. A dark, slim line on the road, an illusion, a trembling silhouette in the reverberations of that implacable light. He spurred his horse and rode ahead to see who was making such a dangerous journey in these solitudes and in this heat. As he approached he saw a woman with her back to him, erect, proud, her arms held out to fly and swaying like a serpent to the rhythm of a secret, glorious dance. He noticed the bundle on her back and deduced it was a child, perhaps dead. He shouted at her, and she did not respond; she kept floating like a mirage until he cut his horse in front of her. When he saw her rolled back eyes, he realized that she was demented or in a trance. He had seen that exalted expression in the
kalendas
, but had believed that it happened only in the collective hysteria of the drums. As a pragmatic French military man, an atheist, Relais was repelled by such possessions, which he considered a further proof of the Africans' primitive condition. Erzulie rose up before the horseman, seductive, beautiful, her serpent tongue between red lips, her body a single flame. The officer raised his crop, touched her on the shoulder, and immediately the enchantment was broken. Erzulie evaporated, and Tete collapsed without a sigh, a pile of rags in the dust of the road. The other soldiers had caught up to their leader, and their horses surrounded the prostrate woman. Etienne Relais jumped down, bent over her, and began to tug at her improvised carrier until he freed the contents: a sleeping or unconscious little girl. He turned the woman over and saw a mulatta very different from the one dancing along the road, a pitiful young woman covered with filth and sweat, her face contorted, one eye purple, her lips parted with thirst, her feet bleeding through rags. One of the soldiers also dismounted and bent down to pour a stream of water from his canteen into the child's mouth and then another into the woman's. Tete opened her eyes and for several minutes did not remember anything, not the forced march, not her daughter, not the drums, not Erzulie. They helped her sit up and gave her more water, until she had enough and the visions in her head took on some sense. "R-Rosette...," she stammered. "She's alive, but she doesn't respond, and we can't wake her," Relais told her. Then the fear of the last days rushed to the slave's memory: laudanum, the plantation in flames, Gambo, her master, and Maurice waiting for her.

Valmorain saw the dust on the road and shrank behind some shrubs, confused by the visceral fear that had begun as he stood before the skinned corpse of his neighbor Lacroix and grown worse up to that moment, when he had lost his sense of time and space and distances; he did not know why he was buried like a hare among a tangle of plants, nor who that runny-nosed little boy who lay in a faint beside him was. The squad stopped close by, and one of the riders shouted Valmorain's name; then he dared take a look, and he saw the uniforms. A howl of relief burst from his gut. He came crawling out, disheveled, ragged, covered with scratches, scabs, and dry mud, sobbing like a baby, and stayed on his knees before the horses, repeating, "Thank you, thank you, thank you." Blinded by the light and dehydrated as he was, he did not recognize Relais, nor was he aware that all the men in the squad were mulattoes; all he needed to see were the uniforms of the French army to know he was safe. He took off the bag tied at his waist and threw a handful of coins before the soldiers. The gold glittered on the ground. "Thank you, thank you." Revolted by that spectacle, Etienne Relais ordered him to pick up his money; he gestured to his subalterns, and one of them dismounted to give Valmorain water and offer him his horse. Tete, who was riding on the croup of a different mount, got down with difficulty because she was not accustomed to riding and had Rosette on her back, and went to look for Maurice. She found him rolled into a ball among the shrubs, delirious with thirst.

They were close to Le Cap and several hours later rode into the city without suffering new mishaps. During that time Rosette had awakened from the stupor of the laudanum, Maurice was sleeping exhausted in the arms of a soldier, and Toulouse Valmorain had recovered his composure. The images of those three days began to fade and the story to change in his mind. When he had a chance to explain what had happened, his version did not resemble what Relais had heard from Tete: Gambo had disappeared from the scene, it was Valmorain who had foreseen the rebels' attack and, given the impossibility of defending his plantation, fled to protect his son, bringing along the slave who had raised Maurice and her little girl. It was he, only he, who had saved them all. Relais made no comment.

The Paris of the Antilles

L
e Cap was filled with refugees who had abandoned their plantations. The smoke from the fires, carried by the wind, floated in the air for weeks. The Paris of the Antilles reeked of garbage and excrement, the corpses of the executed rotting on the gallows, and the mass graves of victims of epidemics and the war. The distribution of supplies was very irregular, and the population depended on ships and fishing boats for food, but the
grands blancs
continued to live in their former luxury, though now it cost them more. Nothing was lacking at their tables, rationing was for others. Parties continued with armed guards at the gates, the theaters didn't close, or bars, and dazzling cocottes still enlivened the night. There was not a single place left in which to take lodging, but Valmorain was counting on the house he'd bought from the Portuguese man before the uprising, and there he installed himself to recover from his fright and tend his physical and moral wounds. Six hired slaves served him, directed by Tete it did not suit him to buy them just when he planned to change his life. He acquired only a cook trained in France, whom he could later sell without losing money, the price of a good cook was one of the few things that had remained stable. He was sure that he would recover his property; it was not the first insurgency of slaves in the Antilles and they had all been crushed. France was not going to allow black bandits to ruin the colony. At any rate, even if the situation was restored to what it had been in the past, he would leave Saint-Lazare, he had already decided that. He knew about the death of Prosper Cambray because the militia had found his body amid the rubble of the plantation. I could not have rid myself of him any other way, he thought. His property was pure ash but the land was there, no one could take that away. He would get a manager, someone who had experience and was habituated to the climate; it was not a time for managers brought from France, as he explained to his friend Parmentier, who was treating Valmorain's feet with healing herbs he had seen Tante Rose use.

"Will you return to Paris,
mon ami
?" the doctor asked.

"I don't think so. My interests lie in the Caribbean, not in France. I am associated with Sancho Garcia del Solar, the brother of Eugenia, may she rest in peace, and we have acquired some lands in Louisiana. And you, what are your plans, Doctor?"

"If the situation does not improve here, I plan to go to Cuba."

"Do you have family there?"

"Yes," the doctor admitted, blushing.

"Peace in the colony depends on the French government. Those republicans bear all the guilt for what has happened here. The king would never have allowed things to reach these extremes."

"I believe that the French Revolution is irreversible," the doctor replied.

"The republic has no idea how to run this colony, Doctor. The commission called back half of the Regiment Le Cap and replaced it with mulattoes. That is a provocation--no white soldier will agree to follow orders from an officer of color."

"Perhaps it is the moment for whites and
affranchis
to learn to live together, since the common enemy are the Negroes."

"I wonder what those savages are after," said Valmorain.

"Freedom,
mon ami
," Parmentier replied. "One of the chiefs, Toussaint, I think he's called, maintains that the plantations can function with free laborers."

"Even if paid, the blacks would not work!" Valmorain exclaimed.

"That no one can be sure of, for it has not been tested. Toussaint says that Africans are peasants, they know the earth, growing things is what they know and want to do," Parmentier insisted.

"What they know and want to do is kill and destroy, Doctor! Besides, that Toussaint has gone over to the Spanish side."

"He takes refuge under the Spanish flag because the French colonists refused to deal with the rebels," the doctor reminded him.

"I was there, Doctor. I tried in vain to convince the other planters to accept the terms of peace proposed by the blacks; all they asked was freedom for the chiefs and their secondary officers, some two hundred in all," Valmorain told him.

"Then blame for the war rests not on the incompetence of the government in France but on the pride of the colonists in Saint-Domingue," Parmentier argued.

"I concede that we must be more reasonable, but we cannot negotiate on equal terms with the slaves--that would be a bad precedent."

"You would have to make a deal with Toussaint, who seems to be the most reasonable of the rebel leaders."

Tete paid attention when the subject was Toussaint. She guarded in the depths of her soul her love for Gambo, resigned to the idea she would not see him for a long time, perhaps never, but he was embedded in her heart, and she supposed he could be among the ranks of that Toussaint. She heard Valmorain say that no revolt of slaves in history had triumphed, but she dared dream the opposite, and wonder what life would be like without slavery. She organized the house as she had always done, but Valmorain explained that things could not be as they were in Saint-Lazare, where all that mattered was comfort and it was irrelevant whether meals were served with gloves or without them. In Le Cap he had to live in style. However much the revolt blazed at the gates of the city, he must return the attentions of the families who often invited him and had taken on the mission of finding him a wife.