Maryse Conde - Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? - A Fantastical Tale

One morning in February, a host of porters swarmed into the palace gardens. The strongest loaded onto their backs Celanire’s fourteen trunks. The others grabbed Thomas’s trophies — elephant tusks, a stuffed lion he claimed to have shot during a hunt, and miles of boa constrictor skin. The nurses had come down from the Home and were comforting Tanella, who seemed on the point of giving up the ghost. Celanire bade her an emotional farewell before setting off for the Ebrié lagoon. However, once she was seated in the fishing canoe under a canopy of woven palm fronds, she seemed to forget those she was leaving behind. She perked up as if the life she had just led no longer mattered. Ludivine, watching her, was shocked by so much insensitivity. Her own heart was grief-stricken. To what unknown destiny were they taking her? She already regretted the end of an era. She knew that the older she got, the more nostalgic she would feel for her childhood and Bingerville, and in spite of herself she would portray the Home as a lost paradise. She would forget its charged atmosphere, loaded with mystery. She would forget the way the nurses took good care of their boarders during the day and then the way everything changed from six in the evening onward. The way the children were hurried up from the refectory to the dormitory. As soon as the last Hail Mary was recited, the nurses locked the doors and vanished. The glow of a large lamp was scarcely reassuring, for once it had drunk its oil it generally went out before midnight, which plunged the room into darkness and a host of eerie shadows. The tots who couldn’t get to sleep thought they heard the hullabaloo of music, noisy conversation, and shouts of laughter.

In early August a new governor arrived in Bingerville, as well as an officer who took over the management of the Home. Without further ado, he removed Tanella and dismissed the nurses. He kept only the cooks, matronly Ebriés and sturdy mothers who would not appeal to anyone. He restored order to the curriculum. For the boys, arithmetic and grammar; for the girls, cutting and sewing. We have to admit, we shall never know what really went on at the Home for Half-Castes. This splendid edifice, which appears in the book on colonial architecture by Frédéric Grogruhé, keeps its secret closely guarded. Closed down for many years when it almost collapsed into ruin, it was later entirely restored and became the Orphanage of the Ivory Coast.

As for Tanella, her life dragged on in sadness and came to an even sadder end. As she was one of the few “women of letters” of her time — let us not forget, this was the term for those who could read and write in the white man’s language — she was hired as a schoolmistress for the mission. This unusual status aroused the lust of Chief Bogui Yesso from the region of Abreby, who hastened to make her one of his wives. But he married her merely for the sake of adding a woman of letters to his harem. During the first year he paraded her around like an expensive piece of jewelry. Then he abandoned her in one of the huts of the women’s compound and neglected her to such an extent that she turned to Catholicism and became deeply religious. Catholicism in fact had spread like wildfire along the Alladian shores. It was conversion upon conversion, christening upon christening. The catechists were too many to be counted. Churches sprang up like mushrooms. At first modest buildings made of bamboo, they were now built of prefabricated materials shipped from France. Tanella, christened Marie-Pierre, died giving birth to her third daughter, for she could only produce babies of the vagina variety. In fact, she had stopped living many years before that — once Celanire had left her.

The day before Tanella’s death — when she was already in her death throes — a dog such as had never been seen before in Abreby, a black hound with gleaming jaws, as tall as a heifer, as muscular as a bull, appeared in the compound. It lay down in front of the dying woman’s hut and uttered the most frightful yelps, groans, and whines. Africans have no particular liking for dogs, that’s a fact, and this one received a hail of mortars and a volley of machetes. Yet nothing would make it budge. If it retreated a few feet, it was only to return to the attack a little later and reconquer lost ground. During the wake ceremony, the commotion it made almost outdid the wails of the professional mourners. It kept watch during the church ceremony. It followed the cortege to the cemetery and stretched out on the black-and-

white-tiled grave that Bogui Yesso, still enamored with prestige, had built for his family. It only vanished at nightfall as suddenly as it had arrived, and nobody ever saw it again.

The Alladian fetish priests concluded it must have been the messenger of a spirit — a spirit far away who was lamenting the death of Tanella.

The inhabitants of Bingerville have nothing good to say about Thomas de Brabant either. He is not credited with any accomplishment. What surprised everyone was that once he was married, he lost interest in everything, he who was so authoritarian, meddled in everything, laid down the law, pontificated and exasperated Africans and Europeans alike. He lost interest in the roads, the bridges, the wharfs, and the railroad. He let his wife wear the pants, as the rather vulgar saying goes. He only stopped by his office long enough to absentmindedly sign the papers his secretary presented to him. At the same time his appearance changed. The former dandy now dressed any old how. His skin grew flabby; he lost the thick black hair he had liked to oil and became potbellied. In short, from a dashing man of authority he turned into a fat stick-in-the-mud.

They discovered the key to this transformation when they found out he was imitating another Thomas, Thomas de Quincey, whose book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Celanire had given him for his thirtieth birthday. Like him, he was drinking laudanum. Under the pretext of treating a toothache, he had vialsful shipped from Grand-Bassam.

Morning, noon, and night he gorged himself on this lovely, amaranthine tincture.

Hakim thought Guiana looked like the Ivory Coast. Same sweltering forests. Green and more green everywhere you looked. Rivers, now in slow motion, now suddenly raging torrents. Only the ocean was different, swamplike, without a line of breakers or rollers. Cayenne especially looked like Bingerville. The same smells of almond, mango, and palm trees. Here too seven months out of twelve the sky was like a wet rag oozing dirty water that overflowed the storm drains and soaked the streets. The houses of the administrators were identical. There were the same public buildings under their rusty roofs, the Governor’s Palace housed in an authentic Jesuit monastery, the bank and the transatlantic shipping company. In short, the same colonial ugliness encrusted amid the splendor of the forest like lice in a magnificent head of hair. The only difference: the buzzards, which ambled across the Place des Palmistes in Cayenne and perched on every available branch, were bigger and smellier than the African vultures. At first he couldn’t help comparing Cayenne to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, where he had stayed weeks, perhaps months, perhaps years (it was all so muddled in his head) at the transportation camp. In contrast, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni was a little jewel. The convicts had built such lovely little houses for the penitentiary administrators, they had christened it “Little Paris”! Men are such wonderful creatures! Even reduced to the scum of the earth, they continue to be artistic geniuses. They built magnificent edifices and designed and painted friezes, frescoes, and paneling. From the transportation camp Hakim should have been sent to the Ile Royale, one of the Iles du Salut. But the cells there were already overflowing. So they sent him to Cayenne, where he became, like so many others, a houseboy, a domestic. Houseboy to Monsieur Thénia, governor of the Banque de Guyane, who lived on the promontory at Saint-François. He did not know exactly when he began forgetting the charm of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni and started liking the wilder, rougher city of Cayenne. He knew the city inside out, from its mangrove swamps and grassy squares to its streets cluttered with handcarts and its magnificent clapboard facades. He wallowed in its few corners of sunlight, soaked up its trails of shadows, and got drunk on its stench. In short, he became attached to its atmosphere of gloom. The town only came to life at carnival time, but the gaiety didn’t suit it. Its smiles looked more like grimaces. Its bursts of laughter rang out like moans.