Island Beneath the Sea (43 page)

Sancho rapped at the door with a small knocker in the shape of a toad, and a fat black woman opened. When she saw Sancho, her expression of bad humor was replaced with an enormous smile. Tete thought she had traveled twenty years in circles, to end at the same place she was when she left Madame Delphine's house. It was Loula. The woman did not recognize her--that would have been impossible--but since she was with Sancho she greeted her and led them to the drawing room. "Madame will be right here, Don Sancho. She is expecting you," she said, and disappeared, making the boards of the floor resound with her elephantine tread.

Minutes later Tete, with her heart leaping, saw the same Violette Boisier of Le Cap at the door, as beautiful as then and with the assurance years and memories bestow. Sancho was transformed in the instant. His Spanish male pomposity disappeared, and it was a timid boy who bent to kiss the beauty's hand, as the tip of his sword caught and turned over a little table. Tete managed to catch on the fly and clutch to her chest a porcelain medieval troubadour as she stared at Violette with awe. "I suppose this is the woman you were telling me about, Sancho," Violette said. Tete noticed the familiarity of her tone and Sancho's shyness; she remembered the gossip and understood that Violette was the Cuban who, according to Celestine, had replaced Adi Soupir in the Spanish lover's heart.

"Madame...we met a long time ago. You bought me from Madame Delphine when I was a girl," Tete managed to get out.

"I did? I d-don't remember," Violette stammered.

"In Le Cap. You bought me for Monsieur Valmorain. I am Zarite."

"Of course! Come to the window so I can see you better. How could I recognize you! You were a skinny little girl then, obsessed with running away."

"I am free now. Well, almost free."

"My God, this is the strangest coincidence. Loula! Come see who's here!" Violette shouted.

Loula came, dragging her huge body, and when she realized who it was, grabbed Tete in a gorilla embrace. Two sentimental tears rose in the woman's eyes when she remembered Honore, associated in her memory with the little child Tete had been. Loula told Tete that before Madame Delphine went back to France, she had tried to sell him, but he wasn't worth anything, he was just a sick old man, and she had to let him go; he would take care of himself begging.

"He went with the rebels before the revolution. He came to tell me good-bye--we were friends. That Honore was a true gentleman. I don't know if he managed to reach the mountains; the road was steep, and he had twisted bones. If he got there, who knows whether they accepted him. He was in no condition to fight in any war," Loula sighed.

"I am sure they accepted him--he knew how to drum and to cook. That is more important than carrying a weapon," Tete said to console her.

She told the priest and the ancient Sister Lucie good-bye, promising to help them tend the sick whenever she could, and moved in with Violette and Loula, as she had longed to do when she was nine. To satisfy a leftover curiosity from two decades back, she asked how much Violette had paid Madame Delphine for her and learned it was the cost of a pair of goats, even though her price went up 15 percent when she was turned over to Valmorain. "That was more than you were worth, Tete. You were an ugly, ill mannered kid," Loula assured her with all seriousness.

They gave Tete the only room for slaves in the house, a room without ventilation but clean, and Violette dug among her clothes and found something adequate for her to wear. Her tasks were so many she couldn't list them, but basically consisted of carrying out the orders of Loula, who no longer had the age or breath for domestic chores and spent the day in the kitchen preparing salves for beauty and syrups for sensuality. No sign on the street announced what was offered inside those walls; word of mouth was enough to attract an endless line of women of all ages, most of them of color, though some whites also came wearing heavy veils.

Violette appeared only in the afternoons; she had not lost the habit of devoting the morning hours to her personal care and to leisure. Her skin, rarely touched by direct sunlight, was as delicate as
creme caramel
, and the fine lines around her eyes gave her character; her hands, which had never washed clothing or cooked, were young, and she had added several pounds that softened her without making her appear matronly. Mysterious lotions had preserved the jet black of her hair, which she combed as she always had in a complicated bun, with a few curls hanging loose to delight the imagination. She still provoked desire in men and jealousy in women and that certainty added a swing to her walk and a purr to her laughter. Her clients confided their cares to her, asked her advice in whispers, and bought her potions without haggling, all with the most absolute discretion. Tete went with Violette to buy the ingredients, from pearls to clear the skin, which she obtained from pirates, to painted glass vials a captain brought her from Italy. "The container is worth more than the content. What matters is the look," Violette told Tete. "Pere Antoine maintains the opposite," Tete countered, laughing in return.

Once a week they went to a scribe, who wrote a letter Violette dictated for her son in France. The scribe took responsibility for putting her thoughts into florid phrases and handsome calligraphy. The letters took only two months to reach the hands of the young cadet, who punctually replied with four sentences in military jargon to say that his condition was positive and he was studying the language of the enemy, without specifying which enemy in particular, given that France had several. "Jean-Martin is just like his father," Violette sighed when she read those missives written in code. Tete dared asked how it was that maternity had not made her flesh flabby, and Violette attributed it to her Senegalese grandmother. She did not confess that Jean-Martin was adopted, just as she never mentioned to Tete her affair with Valmorain. However, she told her all about her long relationship with Etienne Relais, her lover and husband, to whose memory she had been faithful until Sancho Garcia del Solar came onto the scene; she had not fallen in love with any of the earlier suitors in Cuba, including the Galician who was on the verge of marrying her.

"I have always had company in my widow's bed to keep myself in shape. That's why I have good skin and good humor."

Tete judged that she herself would soon be wrinkled and melancholy from having consoled herself alone for so many years, with no incentive but the memory of Gambo.

"Don Sancho is a very good man, madame. If you love him, why don't you two get married?"

"What world do you live in, Tete? Whites do not marry women of color, it's against the law. Besides, at my age I have no reason to marry, especially an incurable carouser like Sancho."

"You could live together."

"I don't want to maintain him. Sancho will die a poor man, while I intend to die rich and be buried in a mausoleum crowned with a marble archangel."

A day or two before the time for Tete's emancipation was reached, Sancho and Violette went with her to the Ursulines' school to tell Rosette the news. They met in a room for visitors, large and nearly empty, with four rough wooden chairs and a large crucifix hanging from the ceiling. On a table sat cups of warm chocolate, with a coagulated skim floating on the top, and an urn for the alms that helped maintain the beggars that came to the convent. A nun attended the interview and kept watch out of the corner of her eye; the students could not be in the presence of a male, even the bishop, without a chaperone, and all greater reason a man as seductive as that Spaniard.

Tete had rarely mentioned the subject of slavery with her daughter. Rosette knew vaguely that she and her mother belonged to Valmorain and compared it with the situation of Maurice, who depended completely on his father and could not decide anything for himself. It did not seem strange to her. All the women and girls she knew, free or not, belonged to a man: father, husband, or Jesus. That was, however, the persistent subject of her letters from Maurice, who being free was nevertheless more affected than she by the absolute immorality of slavery, as he called it. In childhood, when the differences between them were less apparent, Maurice had tended to sink into tragic states of mind caused by the two subjects that obsessed him: justice and slavery. "When we grow up, you will be my master and I will be your slave, and we will live together very happy," Rosette told him once. Maurice shook her, choked with tears. "I will never have slaves! Never! Never!"

Among all the students of color Rosette had the lightest skin, and no one doubted that she was the daughter of free parents; only the mother superior, who had accepted her because of the donation Valmorain made to the school, along with the promise that she would be emancipated in the near future, knew her true situation. This visit turned out to be lengthier than the previous ones in which Tete had been alone with her daughter with nothing to say, both of them uncomfortable. Rosette and Violette hit it off immediately. Tete thought that in a certain way they were alike, not so much for their features as for their color and attitude. They passed the visiting hour in lively chatter, while she and Sancho mutely looked on.

"What a clever and pretty girl your Rosette is, Tete! She's the daughter I wish I'd had!" Violette exclaimed as they left.

"What will happen to her when she leaves school, madame? She is used to living like a rich girl; she has never worked, and she thinks she is white." Tete sighed.

"That is still a while away, woman. We'll see," Violette replied.

Zarite

O
n the appointed day I waited for the judge at the door of the court. The notice was still attached to the wall, as I had seen it every afternoon for those forty days, when I'd gone, with my soul on a thread and a good luck
gris-gris
in my hand, to find out whether anyone had opposed my emancipation. Madame Hortense could stop it, it was very easy for her--all she had to do was accuse me of debauchery or bad character--but it seems she did not dare defy her husband. Monsieur Valmorain had a horror of gossip. In those days I'd had time to think, and I had many doubts. Celestine's warnings were ringing in my head, as well as Valmorain's threats
;
freedom meant I had no help I could count on, no protection or security. If I did not find work, or fell ill, I would end up in the line of beggars the Ursulines fed. And Rosette? "Be calm, Tete. Have faith in God, who never abandons us
,"
Pere Antoine would reassure me. No one came to the court in opposition, and on November 30, 1800, the judge signed my freedom and turned Rosette over to me. Only Pere Antoine was there
;
both Don Sancho and Dr. Parmentier, who had promised to come, had forgot. The judge asked me what surname I would like to have and the saint gave me permission to use his. Zarite Sedella, thirty years old, mulatta, free. Rosette, eleven, quadroon, slave, property of Zarite Sedella. That is what the paper said
;
Pere Antoine read it to me word by word before giving me his blessing and a tight hug. This is how it was.

The saint left immediately to tend to his obligations, and I sat down on a little bench in the place d'Armes to weep with relief. I don't know how long I was there, but it was a long weeping because the sun moved across the sky and my face dried in the shade. Then I felt someone touch my shoulder, and a voice I instantly recognized greeted me
:
"At last a little calm, Mademoiselle Zarite! I thought you were going to dissolve in tears." It was Zacharie, who had been sitting on another bench watching me, in no hurry. He was the most handsome man in the world, but I had never noticed that before because I was blindly in love with Gambo. In his gala livery at the Intendance in Le Cap he cut an imposing figure, and there in the plaza, in a waistcoat bound with moss colored silk, a batiste shirt, boots with tooled buckles, and several gold rings, he looked even better. "Monsieur Zacharie! Is it really you?" He looked a vision, very distinguished, with a few white hairs at his temples and a slim walking stick with an ivory handle.

He sat down by me and suggested we get past any formal treatment and speak like old friends in view of our long relationship. He told me he had hurried away from Saint-Domingue the minute the end of slavery had been announced and set sail on an American clipper that left him in New York, where he did not know a soul, shivering with cold and unable to understand a word of the gibberish those people speak. He knew that most of the refugees from Saint-Domingue had gone to New Orleans, and so managed to come here. He was doing very well. A couple of days before he had by chance seen the notice of my freedom on the wall of the court
;
he had investigated, and when he was sure it was the same Zarite he had known, the slave of Monsieur Toulouse Valmorain, he had decided to come on the indicated date, since his boat would be anchored in New Orleans anyway. He had seen me go into the court with Pere Antoine, had waited for me in the place d'Armes, and then had the delicacy to let me cry myself out before he said hello.

"I have waited thirty years for this moment, and when it comes, instead of dancing with joy I weep
,"
I told him, embarrassed.

"You have time to dance now, Zarite. We will go out and celebrate this very evening
,"
he offered.

"I don't have anything to wear!"

"I will buy you a dress, it is the least you deserve on this day, the most important one in your life."

"Are you rich, Zacharie?"

"I am poor but I live like a rich man. That is wiser than being rich and living like a poor man." He burst out laughing. "When I die, my friends will have to take up a collection to bury me, but my epitaph will say in gold letters
:
'Here lies Zacharie, the wealthiest black man along the Mississippi.' I already ordered the inscription on the stone, and I keep it under my bed."