Island Beneath the Sea (39 page)

Gambo twice had one foot in the grave during the five weeks Parmentier kept him in the hospital, and each time had come back to life smiling and with the memory intact of what he had seen in the paradise of Guinea; his father was waiting, there was always music, the trees were bent down with fruit, vegetables grew untended, fish leaped from the water and could be caught without effort, and everyone was free: the island beneath the sea. He had lost a lot of blood from the three shots that had perforated his body: two in a thigh and the third in his chest. Parmentier spent whole days and nights by his side, battling tooth and nail without ever yielding, because he had taken a liking to the capitaine. He was an exceptionally brave man, something he himself would have liked to be.

"It seems to me I've seen you somewhere before, Capitaine," he told him during one of his excruciating treatments.

"Ah! I see you are not one of those whites incapable of distinguishing one black from another," Gambo jested.

"In this work, the color of one's skin matters little; we all bleed alike, but I confess that sometimes it's difficult for me to tell one white from another," Parmentier replied.

"You have a good memory, Doctor. You must have seen me on the Saint-Lazare plantation. I was the cook's assistant."

"I don't remember that, but your face seems familiar," said the physician. "During that time I used to visit my friend Valmorain, and Tante Rose, the healer. I think she got away before the rebels attacked the plantation. I have never seen her again, but I think of her always. Before I knew her, I would have started by cutting off your leg, Capitaine, and then tried to heal you with bloodlettings. I would have quickly killed you even with the best intentions. If you come out alive it's because of methods she taught me. Do you have any news of her?"

"She is a
docteur feuilles
and a
mambo
. I have seen her several times because even my General Toussaint consults her. She goes from camp to camp healing and giving advice. And you, Doctor, do you know anything about Zarite?"

"About whom?"

"A slave of the white man Valmorain. Tete they called her."

"Yes, I knew her. She went with her master after the Le Cap fire, I think to Cuba," said Parmentier.

"She isn't a slave though, Doctor. She has her freedom. Signed and sealed on a paper."

"Tete showed me that paper, but when they left they still had not legalized her emancipation," the doctor clarified.

During those five weeks, Toussaint Louverture often asked about the capitaine, and on each occasion Parmentier's answer was the same: "If you want me to send him back, don't hurry me, General." The nurses were in love with La Liberte and could scarcely leave him alone; more than one slipped into his bed at night, climbed upon him without crushing him, and administered in measured doses the best remedy for anemia, as he murmured Zarite's name. Parmentier was not unaware, but concluded that if with love the man was getting well, then let them keep loving him. Finally Gambo recovered sufficiently for him to get on his stallion, throw a musket over his shoulder, and go to rejoin his general.

"I thank you, Doctor. I thought I would never know a decent white man," he said in farewell.

"And I thought I would never know a grateful black one," the doctor replied, smiling.

"I never forget a favor or an offense. I hope to be able to repay you for what you have done for me. Count on me."

"You can do that now, Capitaine, if you wish. I need to join my family in Cuba, and you know that leaving here is nearly impossible."

Eleven days later, on a moonless night, Dr. Parmentier was rowed in a fisherman's skiff to a frigate anchored a certain distance from the port. Capitaine Gambo La Liberte had obtained a safe conduct and a passage, one of the few arrangements he made behind Toussaint Louverture's back during his brilliant military career. As a condition, he charged the physician with delivering a message to Tete should he see her again: "Tell her that my life is war and not love; not to wait for me because I have forgotten her." Parmentier smiled at the discrepancy in the message.

Adverse winds pushed the frigate in which Parmentier was traveling with other French refugees to Jamaica, where they were not allowed to debark, but after many changes of course in the treacherous waters of the Caribbean to elude typhoons and buccaneers, they reached Santiago de Cuba. The doctor traveled by land to Havana to look for Adele. He had not been able to send her money during the time they'd been separated and did not know in what state of poverty he would find his family. He had an address she had sent by mail several months before, so he reached a barrio of modest but well tended buildings on a paving stone street: saddlers, wig makers, cobblers, furniture makers, painters, and cooks who were preparing food on their patios to sell in the street. Large, majestic black women in starched cotton dresses and brightly colored
tignons
were coming out of their houses balancing baskets and trays with delicious fried foods and pastries, surrounded by naked children and dogs. The houses had no numbers but Parmentier had a description, and it was not difficult to find Adele's; it was painted cobalt blue and had a red tile roof and a door and two windows embellished with pots of begonias. A card hanging on the front of the house announced in large Spanish letters: "Madame Adele,
modas de Paris
." He knocked with his heart racing, heard a bark and some running footsteps; the door opened, and before him was his youngest daughter, a hand's breadth taller than he remembered her. The girl gave a shout and threw her arms around his neck, wild with joy, and within a few seconds the rest of the family was around him, as his knees doubled with fatigue and love. He had often imagined that he would never see them again.

Refugees

A
dele had changed so little that she was wearing the same dress in which she had left Saint-Domingue a year and a half before. She earned her living sewing, as she always had done, and with great difficulty stretched her modest income to pay her rent and feed her children; it was not in her character to complain about what she didn't have but to be grateful for what she did. She and her children adapted among the many free blacks in the city, and soon she acquired a faithful clientele. She knew her needle and thread trade very well but did not understand fashion. For designs she enlisted Violette Boisier. The two women shared that intimacy that tends to unite people in exile who would not have given each other a second glance in their place of origin.

Violette, with Loula, had settled into a modest house in a barrio of whites and mulattoes, several grades above Adele in the hierarchy of class thanks to her distinction and the money she had saved in Saint-Domingue. She had emancipated Loula against her wishes and put Jean-Martin in a Catholic school to give him the best possible education. She had ambitious plans for him. At eight, the boy, who had the skin of a bronzed mulatto, had such harmonious features and gestures that if he had not worn his hair very short he could have passed for a girl. No one--he least of all--knew he was adopted; that was a secret sealed between Violette and Loula.

Once her son was safe in the hands of the priests, Violette put out her nets to connect with people of the upper classes who could make their life easier in Havana. She moved among the French because the Spanish and Cubans scorned the refugees who had invaded their island in recent years. The
grands blancs
who arrived with money ended up going out to the provinces, where there was land to spare and they could plant coffee or sugarcane, but the rest survived in the cities, some from their savings or from renting out their slaves; others worked or had businesses, not always legitimate, while the newspaper denounced the seditious competition of the foreigners who were threatening Cuba's stability.

Violette did not have to take badly paying work, like so many of her compatriots, but the cost of living was high, and she had to be careful with her savings. She was not of an age, nor did she have the will, to return to her former profession. Loula intended to trap an affluent husband but Violette still loved Etienne Relais and did not want to impose a stepfather on Jean-Martin. She had spent her life cultivating the art of being well liked, and soon she found a group of women friends among whom she sold Adele's dresses and the beauty lotions Loula prepared and earned a living that way. Violette and Adele came to be close friends, the sisters neither had. They had coffee together on Sundays, in house slippers, under an awning on the patio, making plans and adding up bills.

"I will have to tell Madame Relais that her husband died," Parmentier told Adele when he heard that story.

"You won't have to, she knows already."

"How could she know that?"

"Because the opal in her ring broke," Adele explained, serving him a second helping of rice with fried plantain and chopped meat.

Dr. Parmentier, who had proposed in his solitary nights to make it up to Adele for the unconditional love, always in the shadows, she had given him for years, took a separate house and re-created in Havana the dual life he had lived in Le Cap, hiding his family from others' eyes. He became one of the most sought after physicians among the refugees, although he did not gain access to high Havana society. He was the only doctor able to cure cholera with water, soup, and tea, the only one sufficiently honest to admit that there is no remedy for syphilis or yellow fever, the only one who could stop infection in a wound or prevent a scorpion bite from ending in a funeral. His one drawback was that he attended people of all colors. His white patients put up with it because in exile differences of nature tend to be erased and they were not in a situation to demand exclusive attention. They would not, however, have forgiven him a wife and children of mixed blood. That is what he told Adele, though she never asked for explanations.

Parmentier rented a two story house in a barrio for whites and used the first floor as an office and the second for his living quarters. No one knew that he spent his nights several blocks away in a little cobalt blue house. He saw Violette Boisier on Sundays at Adele's. The woman was a very well preserved thirty-eight and in the community of emigres had the reputation of being a virtuous widow. If someone thought he recognized in her a famous cocotte of Le Cap, he immediately discarded that idea as an impossibility. Violette always wore the ring with the broken opal, and there was not a single day she didn't think of Etienne Relais.

None of them had been successful in adapting, and now, several years later, they were just as much foreigners as they'd been on the first day, with the added aggravation that the Cubans' resentment of the refugees had become worse as their numbers grew; they were no longer the wealthy
grands blancs
but ruined people who clustered in barrios where crime and illness fermented. No one liked them. The Spanish authorities harassed them and strewed their paths with legal obstacles, hoping they would succeed in sending them off forever.

A governmental decree annulled any professional license that had not been obtained in Spain, and Parmentier found himself practicing medicine illegally. The parchment with the royal seal of France had no value, and under those conditions he could treat only slaves and poor who rarely were able to pay him. Another difficulty was that he had not learned a single word of Spanish, unlike Adele and his children, who spoke it at top speed with a Cuban accent.

For her part, Violette finally yielded to Loula's pressure and was on the verge of marrying a sixtyish Galician hotel owner, rich and in ill health, perfect according to Loula because he would soon be gone of a natural death, or with a little aid on her part, and leave them well set. The hotel owner, maddened by that late-in-life love, did not try to clarify rumors that Violette wasn't white because it didn't matter to him. He had never loved anyone as he did that voluptuous woman, and when finally he had her in his arms, he discovered that she provoked in him a senseless grandfatherly tenderness that was comfortable to her because it did not compete with the memory of Etienne Relais. The Galician opened his purse, and she could have spent like a sultana, had she wished, but he had forgotten to mention one thing: he was married. His wife had remained in Spain with their only son, a Dominican priest, and neither of them had any interest in that man whom they hadn't seen in twenty-seven years. Mother and son supposed that he was living in mortal sin, pleasuring himself with fat-assed women in the depraved colonies of the Caribbean, but as long as he sent them money regularly they were not concerned with the state of his soul. This suitor believed that if he married the widow Relais his family would never hear of it, and he would have done so had it not been for the intervention of a greedy lawyer who learned about his past and proposed to reap a good harvest. The Galician realized that he could not buy the lawyer's silence, and that the blackmail would be repeated a thousand times. An epistolary battle was begun, and a few months later the son unexpectedly appeared, prepared to save his father from the claws of Satan and the inheritance from the claws of the harlot. Violette, advised by Parmentier, backed out of the marriage, although she continued to visit her lover from time to time so he would not die of sorrow.

That year Jean-Martin turned thirteen, and for five years had been saying that he was going to follow a military career in France, as his father had. Proud and stubborn, as he had always been, he refused to listen to the arguments of Violette, who did not want to be parted from him and who had a horror of the army, where a boy as handsome as he could end up sodomized by a sergeant. Jean-Martin's insistence was so unshakable that finally his mother had to yield. She used her friendship with a ship captain she had known in Le Cap to get him to France. There he was welcomed by a brother of Etienne Relais, also a military man, who took him to the Paris school for cadets in which all the men of his family had been formed. He knew that his brother had married an Antillean woman and so was not surprised by the boy's color; he would not be the only one of mixed blood in the academy.