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

The sequence of events that follows is not entirely reliable. It is a collection of eyewitness accounts gathered here and there that we have pieced together. The next-door neighbors, surprised by the noise, since the Dorlisses were not in the habit of making a commotion, didn’t budge during the quarrel. Only the neighbor opposite picked up courage and peeped through the louvers and outer doors, despite the late hour. She saw Amarante leave the house with a look of defiance, holding a suitcase, and set off in the direction of the seafront. Two homeless people at a street corner comparing their lot saw her pass by and wondered where she could be going at this late hour with such a heavy load. Apparently she sat down on a rock at some distance from the road. After the splendor of the sunset, the night was a magnificent deluge of India ink. A sliver of a moon tucked into a corner of the sky had a hard time illuminating even its own nook. Reassured by the darkness, the cohort of invisible spirits was creating a terrible din. They capered along the shore and swung in the branches of the almond trees. Sometimes they even dived into the ocean from the clifftops, and you could hear a great splash, but not a ripple could be seen on the surface. Other times the spirits mischievously crept up close to Amarante, hissed into her ears, or clasped her neck with their icy cold hands. Just before dawn Amarante walked back to the road. A vegetable grower, lugging his dasheen and gherkins to the Carmel market, hoisted her up exhausted into his cart. He stacked her case among the crates of vegetables and pityingly noticed her swollen face. Another one who had been manhandled by the heavy hand of her husband! Nevertheless he respected her silence and did not pry. He set her down in the Colchide neighborhood where, like every battered wife, she would probably take refuge with her maman . But at seven in the morning, Dorisca, the fishwife, had bumped into Amarante at the coach station, where she took the first carriage to set off for the center of Basse-Terre. There witnesses saw her walk in the direction of the Gai Rossignol conservatory, whose doors were still closed. She remained for a long time, leaning motionless against the iron gate. At 8:30 A.M., Celanire arrived to give the first flute lessons. Nothing had transpired from the conversation the two women had. A student who had been there since nine claims that Amarante emerged from the office around 9:30 A.M., in tears and shaking. One hour later Celanire went to practice her singing exercises with Elissa de Kerdoré, who had just arrived and was smoking cigarette after cigarette under the mango trees in the yard. Several children can confirm that at ten Amarante lay prostrate in the garden, her heavy suitcase standing beside her. Others say she wandered like a lost soul through the neighboring streets. At the stroke of eleven they lost sight of her as she was swallowed up by the flow of women returning from market, the crowds of children running to school, the stream of workers and civil servants and politicians dashing for the Conseil Général.

What is absolutely sure and certain is that around six in the evening two boys who were flinging pebbles at the mouth of the river des Pères saw a woman walk into the water fully clothed. She strode out toward the open sea, purposefully threw herself into the water, and disappeared among the waves. The boys looked at each other and hesitated. They were afraid of Mami Wata, the water spirit, who had the power to lock up the fish in order to starve humans, drive foolhardy swimmers to their death by unleashing a raging storm, or attack them by changing herself into a shark. But their finer feelings got the better of them. Bravely they tore off their clothes and rescued the drowning woman.

5

When, after several long months in the hospital, Amarante had fully recovered, she did not go back to live with Matthieu. Celanire had given her the taste of another life. She felt a kind of shame when she thought of all those years depending on a man and all that care and attention lavished on him that she seldom received in return. She remembered how she would hurriedly get up at midnight to reheat his dinner and, on Sundays, warm his bathwater and cut his fingernails and toenails as if he were some Oriental potentate. In short, she had been his servant. She didn’t go home to her mother either. All those precepts they had rammed down her throat when she was young — Love thy neighbor, Return good for evil — bored her. What was the point of them? Did she deserve to be hurt and neglected like this? As a result of all those scandals, there was no question of her going back into the teaching profession. So she bravely rented an upstairs-downstairs house on the rue du Soldeur and hung a sign over the door that read, “Singing and Music Lessons.” But owing to the proximity of the Gai Rossignol and Celanire’s reputation, she was unable to attract sufficient numbers of pupils and soon lacked the basic necessities of life. She experienced hunger. Consequently, bitterness and resentment mixed with her love for Celanire. While Celanire wallowed in opulence, she had become the victim. Memories of their moments of passion together woke her up during her nights of solitude. If she lived to be a hundred, she would never get over the shock of hearing Celanire laugh that morning she had come seeking refuge, naively reminding her of her promise to live openly as a couple.

Her grief knew no bounds when some good souls informed her that Celanire had quickly got over her loss and was carrying on openly with Elissa de Kerdoré. It didn’t surprise her: she had always thought those two were made for each other — equally attractive, provocative, and diabolical, with that touch of nonchalance of the leisured class. At their initiative, the innocent little island of Fajoux, which is anchored in the crystal-clear waters off the Grand Cul-de-Sac, was transformed into Lesbos. A cohort of Zanmis set up tents and wattle huts, each with her one and only. They swam in their altogether, shamelessly baring the cups of their breasts, the curves of their buttocks, and their fountains of life. They barbecued red snapper and crayfish that they caught themselves. They brazenly caressed each other as they rolled in the burning blanket of sand. Owing to her official duties, such as inaugurating maternity homes, nurseries, and orphanages, Celanire had to stay in Basse-Terre and only joined Elissa on the island at weekends, when she would stimulate intellectual activities, such as never-ending verbal jousting and theatrical entertainments. She inaugurated a poetry competition in Kréyol, a language she had always encouraged. When Elissa, who hated Kréyol and considered it vulgar, criticized her for not speaking it herself, she retorted that the mouth does not always need to express what the heart cherishes. Sometimes Thomas de Brabant came with her, spending the night in the open so as not to get in the way of her lovemaking with Elissa. The fishermen, shocked by the copulation going on almost under their noses, quickly hauled in their nets, and it wasn’t long before there was a shortage of fish in Grande-Terre.

The priests frowned upon all this. But they didn’t dare protest. The governor’s wife had connections in high places. Bishop Chabot’s purple robe covered up for her. They had recently made a deal. The overpopulated orphanages that the church had trouble running had just been handed over to the colonial authorities. Celanire scrubbed and modernized them and hired a dozen girls, whom she sent to be trained in Lyons, where she had kept in touch with the missionaries. As for the orphans, some of them already sang in a choir and had performed at Saint-Pierre in Martinique.

Gripped by jealousy, Amarante began to harbor ideas for revenge. Old rumors came streaming back to her. It had been gossiped around that the young Celanire had been the cause of Ofusan’s death as well as the ruin of Dr. Pinceau. And goodness knows what else. Amarante, who had always been a sensible, down-to-earth person, grew frightened of all these shadowy figments she felt accumulating inside her.