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

Quite frankly, she was ugly, but nevertheless she possessed a piquant sort of charm. Her teeth, perhaps a little too large, were of an impeccable ivory; her cheeks were dotted with warts, much like birthmarks, and her bulging eyes emitted a powerful magnetism. While she hugged Celanire passionately up against her, whispering words of Spanish in her ear, Thomas stood staring at them, hopping from one foot to another in astonishment. Where had the two women first met? By way of explanation Madame Eusebio peremptorily indicated he should leave. Dumbfounded, he closed the door behind him and went to join Ludivine, slumped in a chaise longue on the deck. To while away the time Ludivine was making an effort to read, but Madame Bovary, Eugénie Grandet, and Le Père Goriot, all those books her father had recommended as masterpieces, made her yawn, and she sat there blinking and staring at the dazzling lid of the Pacific clapped over the ocean depths.

Today ocean travel is coming back into fashion. People pay a fortune to cruise slowly from one point of the globe to another. But at that time travel by ship was boring, and everyone dreamed of a faster mode of transportation. On board there were very few distractions. During the day the men played endless games of billiards. In the evening they sat down to poker before crowding into the bar to wet their mustaches in the crushed ice of their cocktail glasses. The women badmouthed each other behind their backs and rivaled in elegance at dinnertime, which was occasionally followed by a cotillion that alone broke the monotony of the journey. Every Saturday they danced the waltz or the foxtrot. At night they huddled under their blankets on chaise longues and peered into the dark for the sign of a light on the coast. The farther north they sailed, the greater the number of birds that flocked slowly across the sky. But nobody looked up in that direction. These landlubbers felt they had been tossed by the waves from time immemorial and had lost touch forever with their familiar surroundings. They imagined they would never get rid of the peppery, bitter smell of the sea, which irritated their nostrils.

From that moment on Madame Eusebio never left Celanire’s cabin. From morning to night it was filled with the smoke from the mysterious plants she burned. She barred Thomas from entering, and he was reduced to wandering the deck at all hours of the day, lighting up Havana after Havana in the smoking room and downing glasses of port in the bar. Sometimes the captain took pity on him and invited him to his table for meals. But Thomas never failed to launch into endless tirades against the conquistadors who had devastated the Amerindian cultures. He also extolled the merits of Simón Bolívar and regretted that his dream of building the Gran Colombia had never been realized. Moreover, he meddled in politics, daring to criticize President Eloy Alfaro and saying it served him right if the crowd had recently torched him like a carnival puppet. Blathering away in this fashion, he appeared to forget that his traveling companions possessed the courtesy of the Spanish and that his Gallic outspokenness risked offending them. In short, the captain ended up leaving him to lap up his soup all alone in his corner. At night he went and slept on a mattress in his daughter’s cabin that the stewards had laid out on the floor. He quickly realized that here again his conversation bored Ludivine to tears, and he took comfort in his beloved poems translated from Quechua. Since he had lost his sleep worrying over Celanire’s condition and read until dawn, he wrapped the only lamp in the cabin with a green shawl so as not to disturb the young girl. In the early hours of the morning, while she was still asleep, he slipped on his clothes without washing.

We don’t know whether Madame Eusebio treated Celanire with the medication recommended by Dr. Iago Lamella. Cod-liver oil? Shots of camphorated oil? It’s highly unlikely! She did exactly whatever came into her head. We do know with certainty, almost down to the last detail, the diet she had her follow. Twice a day she went down into the heat of the kitchens, tied an apron around her waist, and began preparing her patient’s food tray. The most incredible stories began to circulate about her behavior, spread by the chefs and kitchen boys. For them there was no doubt Madame Eusebio was a bruja, worthy of those witches from the southern coast of Peru. More than milk, she needed blood and more blood, a never-ending request for blood. Sometimes she curdled it with rock salt, sliced it, then steamed it in a pan sprinkled with chopped parsley. Other times she filled vials of it, which she wrapped in her mantilla as a precaution against prying eyes. She searched for offal, liver, hearts, and brains and above all, filet steaks, which she cut into fine strips like carpaccio. Despite his aversion for Madame Eusebio, Thomas very quickly ascertained the results of such a treatment. In a few days’ time, Celanire emerged from her drowsiness. In the morning she would leaf through some illustrated magazines and in the afternoon appear on deck, leaning on the arm of her nurse. She would shuffle over to the railings, close her eyes, letting the ocean breeze caress her face, then totter back and lie down on a chaise longue. While Madame Eusebio wrapped her legs in a plaid rug, she would exchange a few words, which got less laborious by the day, with her husband and stepdaughter. Her interest in her traveling companions and for life on board returned. What music did they dance to at last night’s cotillion? What was Ludivine reading? Had she managed to play her Beethoven on the piano in the smoking room? Then she went back inside her cabin as soon as the wind freshened. The entire first class waited for these moments, however short they were. Although the women turned their noses up at her color, the men lathered themselves up into a frenzy over the contours of her breasts, the curve of her hips, and a glimpse of her ankle, seized once more by their age-old fascination for the morena . Of course there was always that wretched kerchief tied around her neck. What did it hide? Thereupon the most outlandish stories began to circulate. At the age of sixteen Celanire had been doused with acid by a lover she had scorned. Aiming for her eyes, his hand had trembled with rage, and he had drenched her throat. This had occurred somewhere in Africa, a few years before she married Thomas. The latter had used his influence as governor and had the guy shipped to a penal colony. He was probably still there. Or else they claimed that as a child she had almost ripped her head off with a skipping rope and had been patched up by the best surgeon in Guadeloupe, who had then raped her. And so on and so on…But the one thing that emerged from all this gossip, where bits of truth had been crudely stitched on to bits of legend, was that Celanire was a woman best not to meddle with. In her time, as the Peruvians say, she had waltzed with Lucifer and danced the polka with Marshal Castilla. They pitied Thomas, regarding him simply as the incarnation of the perfect cuckold.

Celanire improved every day during the two-week voyage. Once they reached the coast of Ecuador, she was fully cured.

Perhaps it was the effect of the illness, but from that date on Celanire’s character radically changed. Up till then she had been the life and soul of the party, full of energy, always on the move, a little person whose company, after all, was somewhat tiresome. She slowed down, wrapped herself in thought, and became languorous. Her eyes lost their sparkle and deepened. She let others express their opinions and listened to them. She seemed to be constantly hiding inside her things, which were giving her food for thought. Her language too became more moderate, reflecting her new mood. She began to repeat that she needed a new aim in life to continue, a new reason for living.