Maryse Conde: Victoire: My Mother's Mother

I can therefore only use my imagination.

It wasn’t rape; that I’m certain of.

For her future son-in-law, whose heart she wanted to win through his stomach, Gaëtane used to send over a series of small dishes. At noon Danila would pile the plates on a tray that she covered with an embroidered napkin. With the tray on her head Victoire would trot off to Les Basses, which was then a densely populated suburb on the outskirts of Grand Bourg. She never found Dernier at home. He could be found either at the schoolhouse helping out the dunces, or downing neat rums at the Rayon d’Argent rum store with the party’s farm laborers. She would push open the door, which was never locked (in those days a burglary was unheard of), and arrange the plates on the table. That too was a moment of liberty that she made the most of. In order to comply with his political opinions, Dernier lived in a modest two-room cabin. The place, however, was unique. Books! Piles of books! Everywhere you looked. Piled up on the floor. Stacked haphazardly on shelves along the walls. Some were dog-eared. Others were annotated. Yet others were in shreds. You sensed that their owner loved them and read them. Not like Fulgence, who kept his leather-bound volumes in a mahogany glass cabinet and never touched them.

What a magical object a book is! Even more so for someone who can’t read, who doesn’t know there are bad books that are not worth sacrificing whole forests for.

Victoire would turn them over and over again in the palms of her hands. Sometimes she opened them and studied the signs that were indecipherable to her. She regretted her ignorance. Yet her heart did not hold Caldonia to blame. All she wanted to remember was Caldonia’s tenderness. Living a life of solitude, she could constantly hear Caldonia’s grumpy, affectionate voice repeating the riddles whose answers she knew by heart but pretended to search for:

“On ti bòlòm ka plin on kaz?” (A little man who fills the whole room.) A candle.

One day. The heat was suffocating. Dry lightning streaked the sky. The sea was glowing like a gold bar being smelted. With tongues hanging out, the dogs did little else but sniff one another’s backside and seek the shade. Livid, the anole lizards puffed up their dewlaps on the stems of the hibiscus. Victoire arrived at Les Basses soaked in sweat. For once, Dernier was at home. He had taken off his frock coat and, shirt wide-open on his hairy chest, he was fanning himself with a newspaper. She greeted him shyly in a muffled, slightly hoarse voice.

“Ben l’bonjou, misié!”

He inspected the tray, tasted the food, made a face, shrugged his shoulders, and exclaimed in Creole:

“What bunch of heartless individuals sent you out in this heat?”

Victoire remained expressionless. Did she share his opinion? He disappeared into the bedroom and came back with a towel that he threw at her.

“Go and wash your face in the washroom,” he ordered.

“Washroom” was a fancy word for it. A trellis fence marked out a space behind the cabin where a half-empty water jar and toiletry utensils could be found. Victoire obeyed and went outside. He came out onto the doorstep to stare at her with his arrogant eyes. Out of modesty she hesitated to undo her headtie in front of him. When she finally made up her mind, her black hair immediately tumbled down to her shoulders.

“What’s your name?” he shouted.

“Victwa, misié!”

“Where’re you from?”

“La Treille, yes!”

She filled a basin, washed her face and neck, dried herself, then went back inside. He had settled back in the rocking chair and looked up to stare at her with sustained attention, caressing her breasts with his eyes. Under this fiery gaze, she picked up the dishes from the day before and got ready to take her leave.

It was then that he stood up and walked over to her.

“You’re in too much of a hurry!”

He took her by the arm.

Did they make love that day? It’s unlikely.

I believe on the contrary that she was frightened; frightened by his touch, by this male smell that was filling her nostrils for the first time. She wriggled free, secured the tray on her head, and made a bee line for the town. People who saw her shoot past strained their necks. What was this crazy girl running after? Sunstroke, that’s all she could hope to get.

Danila’s suspicions were aroused from the very first day. Monstrous suspicions. Amid the ensuing misfortune, she grouched that her heart had warned her before everyone else.

She was putting the final touches to a sea urchin stew when Victoire came charging in, red and sweating. She was coming back from Les Basses, Danila remembered. What was she running away from? No use asking her, she wouldn’t answer. Danila noticed her hands trembling as she clumsily put away the plates she had brought back, even more awkwardly than usual. She almost fell flat on her face while crossing the yard. In charge of seasoning the salad, she mixed up the salt and pepper servers. While clearing the table, she crossed the knives and forks under Gaëtane’s very eyes and earned a sharp reprimand to which visibly she paid no attention.

Then she left untouched her more modest meal (no hors d’oeuvres or dessert), which she took with Danila in the kitchen. She sat daydreaming, her chin resting on the palm of her hand, before tackling the washing-up and breaking two ramekins in one go.

ONE MORNING, SHE who was generally mute as a blowfish, started humming a song while putting the wash to bleach. An old wake ceremony song that Oraison used to sing at La Treille, each time accompanied by bursts of laughter that flew from all sides. An old melody that Caldonia liked:

Zanfan si ou vouè

Papa mò

Téré li an ba tono la

Sé pou tout gout

Ki dégouté

Y tombé an goj a papa

In her amazement, Danila, who was busy kneading the batter for vegetable marinades, grated her left middle finger, mistaking it for a chunk of pumpkin.

IF PEOPLE HAD eyes to see — but people are blind, that’s a fact, and can’t see farther than the end of their noses — they would have noticed one thing: that Victoire’s beauty, up till then questionable, argued over, even contested, burst into the open.

Here she was suddenly less sickly, less adolescent. Not in the least bit little Miss Sapoti. A head of hair as thick as the Black Forest. Surreptitiously, her portliness made her breasts heavier and rounded her shoulders. Her overly pale complexion took on a velvety texture and darkened.

Danila, made perspicacious by her hatred, was the only one to notice this metamorphosis, which was even more suspect since Victoire no longer touched her food. What nurtured her were the kisses, the caresses, and the sweet words breathed into her. From where?

From a man, no doubt.

There is nothing like love to make a woman as beautiful as that. It’s not only the feeling. But the act. Making love.

What man are we talking about?

Danila refused to imagine the unimaginable or a fortiori speak the unspeakable. As her nurse, mabo Danila had held Thérèse over the baptismal font. She had wiped her behind, washed her menstrual-stained undergarments. She had no proof whatsoever, but wanted to shout at her:

“Watch out! Open both eyes! You think she’s a child, but she’s not the child you think she is. She’s a perverted little thing. A female of the first degree!”

Fifty years later, on her deathbed, Danila was still racked by remorse. She beat her breast: “Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” For hadn’t she heard whisper that Dernier was an incurable womanizer? Under the guise of literacy lessons, Dernier received a constant stream of peasant girls. Some rumors had it that he was the father of Marinette’s son, who worked at the Folle-Anse plantation, and also Toinette’s, who toiled at Buckingham. Yet she hadn’t told anyone of these rumors. Not even her confessor. What was holding her back? The fear of hurting her beloved Thérèse. And now look what happened!