Isabel Allende - Island Beneath the Sea

"What can I do, Tete?" asked Parmentier.

"Please, Doctor, can you ask Monsieur Valmorain? I have to know whether my son is alive, whether he sold him, to whom…"

"It isn't appropriate for me to do that, it would be discourteous. If I were you, I would not think about the baby any more."

"Yes, Doctor," she replied, her voice nearly inaudible.

"Don't worry, I am sure that he is in good hands," Parmentier added, pained.

Tete left the room, noiselessly closing the door.

With the birth of Maurice the household routines changed. If Eugenia was calm when she woke, Tete dressed her, took her out for a few steps around the patio, and then installed her in the gallery, with Maurice in his cradle. At a distance, Eugenia seemed a normal mother watching over her baby's sleep-except for the mosquito netting that covered them both-but that illusion faded on closer view, when the woman's absent expression became visible. A few weeks after the birth, Eugenia suffered another of her crises and did not want to go outside, convinced that the slaves were watching and waiting to kill her. She spent the day in her room, slipping between the befuddlement of laudanum and delirium of her dementia, so lost that she remembered very little of her son. She never asked how he was being fed, and no one told her that Maurice's nourishment came from the bosom of an African, or she would have concluded that he was suckling poison milk. Valmorain hoped that the unwavering instinct of maternity would make his wife sane again, like a gust of wind blowing over her bones and heart, leaving her clean inside, but one day when he saw her shake Maurice like a stuffed doll to quiet him, with the risk of breaking his neck, he realized that the most serious threat to the baby was its own mother. He grabbed Maurice from her and, unable to contain himself, slapped her so hard that she toppled backward to the floor. He had never struck Eugenia, and he himself was surprised at his violence. Tete helped up her mistress, who was crying without understanding what had happened, tucked her into bed, and went to prepare an infusion for her nerves. Toulouse stopped her on the way and put the child in her arms.

"From this minute on you are in charge of my son. You will pay dearly for anything that happens to him. Do not allow Eugenia to touch him ever again!" he bawled.

"And what do I do when my maitresse asks for her son?" Tete asked, clutching the tiny Maurice to her breast.

"I don't care what you do! Maurice is my only son, and I will not allow that imbecile to harm him."

Tete partially carried out his instructions. She took the infant to Eugenia for brief moments, and let her hold him while she was watching. The mother would sit motionless with the little bundle on her knees, looking at him with an expression of amazement that soon gave way to impatience. After a few minutes she would hand him back to Tete as her attention wandered off in another direction. Tante Rose had the idea of wrapping a rag doll in Maurice's blanket and they found that the mother did not notice the difference; in that way they could space the visits until eventually they were no longer necessary. They moved Maurice to another room, where he slept with his wet nurse, and during the day Tete carried him on her back, tied in a cloth the way African women carried theirs. If Valmorain was in the house, she put the baby in his cradle in the drawing room or in the gallery, so he could see his son. Tete's smell was the only one Maurice identified during the first months of his life; the wet nurse had to put on one of her blouses before the baby accepted her breast.

The second week of July, Eugenia went outside before dawn, barefoot and in her night shift, and tottered off in the direction of the river along the lane of coconut palms that was the entrance to the big house. Tete sounded the alarm, and crews formed and immediately joined with the plantation guards to look for her. The hounds led them to the river, where they discovered her in water up to her neck, her feet stuck in the thick mud of the bottom. No one could understand how she had come so far since she was afraid of the dark. At night her fiendish howls often reached as far as the slaves' huts, giving them gooseflesh. Valmorain believed that Tete was not giving his wife enough drops from the blue vial, since had she been sufficiently sedated, she could not have escaped, and for the first time he threatened to have Tete flogged. She spent several terrifying days anticipating the punishment, but her master never gave the order.

Soon Eugenia was completely disconnected from the world. The only person she tolerated was Tete, who slept by her side at night, curled up on the floor, ready to rescue her from her dreams. When Valmorain wanted the slave, he let her know with a gesture at dinner. She would wait until the sick woman was asleep, then stealthily cross through the house to the main room on the opposite side. It was one such time that Eugenia had waked alone in her room and escaped to the river, and that may have been why her husband did not make Tete pay for that breach of her mistress's care. These behind-a-closed-door, nocturnal embraces between master and slave in the large bed chosen years before by Violette Boisier were never mentioned in the light of day, they existed only on the plane of dreams. At Eugenia's second attempt at suicide, this time a fire that nearly destroyed the house, the situation became clear, and after that no one tried to maintain appearances. It was known in the colony that Madame Valmorain was demented, and few were surprised, since rumors had circulated for years that the Spanish woman came from a long line of hopeless madwomen. Besides, it was not a rare thing for white women who had come from outside the island to become deranged in the colony. Their husbands sent them to recover in a different climate and consoled themselves with the stream of young girls of every shade and tone the island offered. Creoles, on the other hand, flourished in that decadent ambience, where they could succumb to temptations without paying the consequences. In the case of Eugenia, it was already too late to send her anywhere except an asylum, an option Valmorain's sense of responsibility and pride would never allow him to contemplate: dirty linen was washed at home. His house had many rooms, a drawing room and a dining hall, an office and two large storage rooms, so he could spend weeks without seeing his wife. He had entrusted her to Tete, and he focused his attention on his son. He had never imagined that it was possible to love another being so deeply, more than the sum of all his previous affections, more than he loved himself. There was no emotion that resembled what Maurice evoked in him. He could spend hours just watching him; he constantly surprised himself thinking about his son, and once he turned when he was on the way to Le Cap and raced back at a full gallop with the presentiment that something horrible had happened to him. His relief when he found that was not the case was so overwhelming that he burst into tears. He would sit in his easy chair holding his son in his arms, feeling the sweet weight of his head against his shoulder and his warm breath on his neck, breathing in the odor of sour milk and childish sweat. He trembled thinking of the accidents or plagues that could take Maurice from him; half the children in Saint-Domingue died before they reached five. They were the first victims in an epidemic, and that was not even counting intangible dangers like curses, which he insincerely jeered and mocked to others, or an uprising of slaves in which the last white would perish, as Eugenia had prophesied for years.

The mental illness of his wife gave Valmorain a good excuse to avoid social life, which he abhorred, and by three years after the birth of his son he had turned into a recluse. His business obliged him to go to Le Cap, and from time to time to Cuba, but it was dangerous to move about because of the bands of Negroes who descended from the mountains to lay siege to the roads. The ceremonial burning of the Maroons in 1780, and others after that, had not discouraged slaves from running away or the Maroons from attacking plantations and travelers. He preferred to stay at Saint-Lazare. I need nothing, he told himself with the cunning pride of those with a calling for solitude. As the years passed he became less fond of people; everyone, except Dr. Parmentier, seemed stupid or venial. He had only commercial relations, like his Jewish manager in Le Cap or his banker in Cuba. The other exception, aside from Parmentier, was his brother-in-law, Sancho Garcia del Solar; though Valmorain seldom saw him they had a rather regular correspondence. Sancho amused him, and the businesses they undertook together had turned out to be beneficial for both. Sancho often good-humoredly confessed that that was a true miracle, because he had never done well before he met Valmorain. "Prepare yourself, brother-in-law, because any day now I will sink you," he would joke, but he continued to ask for loans that after a while were returned many times over.