Island Beneath the Sea (29 page)

They looked out the service door onto the back alley, bombarded with debris and ashes from the blazing buildings but empty. Valmorain felt disoriented--he had never used that door or that passageway and did not know where it led--but Tete went ahead without hesitating, straight toward the conflagration of the battle. In that instant, when encounter with the rebels seemed inevitable, they heard firing and saw a small squad of Galbaud's regular troops, no longer trying to defend the city but attempting a retreat to the ships. They were shooting with order, serene, not breaking rank. The rebel blacks occupied part of the street, but the steady fire kept them at a distance. At that point Valmorain, for the first time, could think with a certain clarity, and he saw there was no time to vacillate. "Come! Run!" he yelled. They rushed after the soldiers, taking shelter among them, and thus, hopping among fallen bodies and still burning debris, they ran that two blocks, the longest of their lives, as the firearms opened a way for them. Not knowing how, they found themselves at the port, which was illuminated like broad day by the fires; thousands of refugees had already gathered there, and more were arriving. Several lines of soldiers were protecting them, firing at the Negroes attacking on three sides, as the whites fought among themselves like animals to climb into the available boats. No one was in charge of organizing the retreat; it was a maddened stampede. In desperation, some were jumping into the water and attempting to swim toward the ships, but the sea was boiling with sharks attracted by the scent of blood.

At that moment General Galbaud appeared on horseback with his wife behind him, surrounded by a small praetorian guard that was defending him and clearing the way, beating back the crowd with their weapons. The attack by the Negroes had taken Galbaud by surprise--it was the last thing he had expected--but he realized immediately that the situation had undergone a complete reversal, and all that was left was to try to find safety. He just had time to rescue his wife, who for several days had been in bed recovering from an attack of malaria and had no suspicion of what was happening outside. A shawl was wrapped over her negligee and she was barefoot, with her hair caught into a braid hanging down her back; her expression was indifferent, as if she had not noticed the battle and the fire. In some way she had remained unmarked; in contrast, her husband's beard and hair were singed and his clothing ripped, stained with blood and soot.

Valmorain ran toward the general, waving his pistol; he was able to pass through the guards, get right up to the officer, and hold on to his leg with his free hand. "A boat! A boat!" he implored a man he thought was his friend, but Galbaud replied by pushing him away with a kick to his chest. A flash of anger and desperation blinded Valmorain. The entire scaffolding of good manners that had sustained him during his forty-three years disintegrated, and he was changed into a cornered beast. With a strength and agility he did not know he had, he leaped up, grabbed the general's wife about the waist, and wrenched her off the horse with a violent tug. Legs flailing, the woman fell to the warm cobbles, and before the guard could react Valmorain had put his pistol to her head. "A boat, or I kill her right here!" he threatened with such determination that no one doubted he would do it. Galbaud stopped his soldiers. "All right, friend, be calm, I will get you a boat," he said in a voice hoarse from smoke and gunpowder. Valmorain seized the woman's hair, pulled her up from the ground, and forced her to walk ahead of him, his pistol at her neck. The shawl was left behind on the ground, and through the cloth of her negligee, transparent in the orange light of that fiendish night, he saw her slim body stumble forward on tiptoe as he held her high in the air by the braid. In that way they reached the boat that was waiting for Galbaud. At the last moment the general tried to negotiate; there was room only for Valmorain and his son, he claimed; they could not give priority to the mulatta while thousands of whites pushed forward to climb in. Valmorain prodded the general's wife to the edge of the dock, where the water reflected fire and blood. Galbaud realized that with the least vacillation that unsettled man would throw her to the sharks, and he yielded. Valmorain climbed with his party into the boat.

Help to Die

O
ne month later, on the smoking remains of Le Cap, which was reduced to rubble and ash, Sonthonax proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves on Saint-Domingue. Without them the French would not have been able to wage a war against their internal enemies and against the English, who now occupied the south. That same day Toussaint also declared emancipation from his encampment in Spanish territory. He signed the document as Toussaint Louverture, the name with which he would enter history. His ranks were growing, he exercised more influence than any of the other rebel leaders, and by then he was already thinking of changing sides; only republican France would recognize the liberation of his people, something no other country was prepared to accept.

Zacharie had been waiting for this opportunity from the time he could think; he had lived obsessed with freedom, although his father had, since Zacharie was in the cradle, driven home the pride of being majordomo at the Intendance, a position normally held by a white man. He took off his opera-admiral's uniform, collected his savings, and set sail on the first ship leaving the port that day, never asking where it was going. He knew that the emancipation was only a political card that could be revoked at any moment, and decided not to be there when that happened. From living so long with whites he had come to know them profoundly, and he imagined that if the monarchies triumphed in the next election of the Assemblee Nationale in France, Sonthonax would be removed from his post, the vote would go against emancipation, and the Negroes in the colony would have to keep fighting for their freedom. He, however, did not want to sacrifice himself; to him the war seemed a squandering of resources and lives, the least reasonable way to resolve conflicts. In any case, his experience as majordomo had little value on an island torn apart by violence since the times of the Spanish Conquest, and he should take advantage of the opportunity to seek other horizons. He was thirty-eight years old, and he was ready to change his life.

Etienne Relais learned of the double proclamation hours before he died. The wound in his shoulder worsened rapidly during the days Le Cap was being sacked and burned to its foundations, and when finally he could worry about it, gangrene had set in. Dr. Parmentier, who had spent those days without rest, attending to hundreds of wounded with the help of the nuns who had survived being raped, examined him when it was already too late. His clavicle was shattered, and because of the position of the wound there was no possibility of the extreme solution of amputation. The remedies he had learned from Tante Rose, along with other curatives, were futile. Etienne Relais had seen wounds of many types, and by the odor he knew he was dying, and what he most lamented was that he would not be able to protect Violette from the unknowns of the future. Lying on the floorboards of a hospital, without a mattress, he was breathing with difficulty, soaked in the pasty sweat of dying. The pain would have been unbearable for another, but he had been wounded before; he had lived a life of privation, and he had a stoic scorn for the pains of his body. He did not complain. With closed eyes he evoked Violette, her cool hands, her purring laughter, her slippery waist, her translucent ears, her dark nipples, and her smile, feeling himself to be the most fortunate man in this world for having had her for fourteen years. Beloved Violette, beautiful, eternal, his. Parmentier did not try to distract him, he merely offered him the choice of opium, the only available sedative, or a powerful potion that would end his torment in a matter of minutes, an option that as a physician he should not propose, but he had witnessed so much suffering on the island that the oath of preserving life at any cost had lost meaning; more ethical in certain cases was to help someone die. "Poison, as long as it isn't needed by another soldier," was the wounded man's choice. The doctor bent very close to hear him, because his voice was barely a murmur. "Look for Violette, tell her I love her," Etienne Relais added before the doctor emptied a little vial into his mouth.

In Cuba, at that very instant, Violette Boisier banged her right hand against the stone fountain where she had gone to get water, and the opal of the ring she had worn for fourteen years shattered. She dropped down beside the fountain with a piercing scream and pressed her hand to her heart. Adele, who was with her, thought she had been bitten by a scorpion. "Etienne, Etienne," Violette repeated, tears streaming.

Five blocks from the fountain where Violette knew she had been widowed, Tete was standing under an awning in the best hotel in the city of Havana beside a table where Maurice and Rosette were drinking pineapple juice. It was not permitted for her to sit with guests, nor was it for Rosette, but the girl passed as being Spanish; no one suspected her true status. Maurice contributed to the deceit by treating her like his younger sister. At another table, Toulouse Valmorain was talking with his brother-in-law Sancho and their banker. The flotilla of refugees General Galbaud had led out of Le Cap that fateful night beneath a rain of ashes was heading at full sail toward Baltimore, but several of those hundred ships had turned toward Cuba carrying
grands blancs
who had family or interests there. Overnight, thousands of French families disembarked on the island to escape the political storm on Saint-Domingue. They were received with generous hospitality by the Cubans and Spanish, who never thought that the frightened visitors would become permanent refugees. Among them were Valmorain, Tete, and the children. Sancho Garcia del Solar took them into his house, which during those years without anyone bothering to care for it had deteriorated even further. Faced with the cockroaches, Valmorain decided to install himself and his party in the best hotel in Havana, where he and Maurice occupied a suite with two balconies overlooking the sea, while Tete and Rosette slept in the lodging for slaves accompanying their masters on those voyages, windowless little rooms with dirt floors.

Sancho lived the comfortable life of a confirmed bachelor; he spent more than was wise on parties, women, horses, and gaming tables, but he kept dreaming, as he had in his youth, of making a fortune and restoring his name to the prestige it had known in his grandparents' time. He was always on the lookout for opportunities to make money, so a couple of years earlier he'd had a chance to buy lands in Louisiana with funds sent him by Valmorain. His contribution was his commercial vision, his social contacts, and work--as long as it wasn't too much, as he always said, laughing--while his brother-in-law furnished the capital. Ever since he'd had the idea he had frequently traveled to New Orleans, and there acquired property on the banks of the Mississippi. At first Valmorain had considered the project a wild adventure, but now it was the only sure thing he had, and he proposed to convert that abandoned land into a great sugar plantation. He had lost a lot in Saint-Domingue but he was not without resources, thanks to his investments, his enterprises with Sancho, and the good judgment of his Jewish agent and Cuban banker. That was the explanation he had offered to Sancho, and to anyone who had the indiscretion to ask. Alone before the mirror, however, he could not avoid the truth that stared back at him from deep within his eyes: the greater part of that capital was not his, it had belonged to Lacroix. He kept telling himself that his conscience was clean, he had never intended to benefit from his friend's tragedy nor to take control of his money; it had simply fallen to him from the sky. When the Lacroix family had been assassinated by the rebels on Saint-Domingue and the receipts Valmorain had signed for money received had burned in the fires, he found himself in possession of an account in gold pesos that he himself had opened in Havana to hide Lacroix's savings and that no one knew existed. On each of his voyages he had deposited the money his neighbor had handed him, and his banker had placed it in an account identified only by a number. The banker never knew about Lacroix and later made no objection when Valmorain transferred the funds to his own account, believing that they were in fact his. Lacroix had heirs in France who had full rights to those assets, but Valmorain analyzed the facts and came to the conclusion that it was not up to him to go look for them, and that it would be stupid to leave the gold buried in a bank vault. It was one of those rare cases when Fortune knocked at the door and only an idiot would let her pass by.

Two weeks later, when news from Saint-Domingue left no doubts about the cruel anarchy reigning in the colony, Valmorain decided he would go to Louisiana with Sancho. Life in Havana was very entertaining for anyone eager to pay for it, but he could not lose more time. He realized that if he followed Sancho from gaming house to gaming house, and from brothel to brothel, he would end up eating away his savings and his health. It would be much better to take his charming brother-in-law away from his great friends and give him a project to the measure of his ambition. A Louisiana plantation could stir in Sancho the live coals of moral fortitude that nearly everyone possesses, he thought. In those years he had acquired an older brother's affection for that man whose defects and virtues he lacked. That was why they got along so well. Sancho was a big talker, an adventurer, imaginative and brave, the kind of man able to rub elbows with either princes or buccaneers, irresistible to women, a rogue with a good heart. Valmorain did not consider Saint-Lazare a complete loss, but until he could recover it, he would concentrate his energies on Sancho's project in Louisiana. Politics no longer interested him, the fiasco with Galbaud had scalded him. The hour had come for him to produce sugar again, the only thing he knew how to do.

The Punishment

V
almorain notified Tete that they would be leaving on an American schooner in two days' time, and gave her money to buy clothing for the family.