Isabel Allende - Island Beneath the Sea

Just as Zacharie had promised, that was a happy day. This is how I remember it.

In Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture maintained precarious control under a military dictatorship, but the seven years of violence had devastated the colony and impoverished France. Napoleon was not going to allow that bow-legged black, as he called him, to impose conditions. Toussaint had proclaimed himself Gouverneur a Vie, for life, inspired by Napoleon's title of Premier Consul a Vie, and treated him as an equal. Bonaparte planned to crush him like a cockroach, put the blacks to work on the plantations, and return the colony to dominion by the whites. In the Cafe des Emigres in New Orleans, the clients followed the confused events of the following months with fervent attention; they had not lost hope of going back to the island. Napoleon sent a large expedition under the command of his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, who brought with him his beautiful wife Pauline Bonaparte. Napoleon's sister traveled with courtesans, musicians, acrobats, artists, furniture, and decorative objects, everything desirable to establish in the colony a court as splendid as the one she had left behind in Paris.

They left Brest at the end of 1801, and two months later Le Cap was bombarded by Leclerc's ships and reduced to ashes for the second time in ten years. Toussaint Louverture did not blink an eye. Unmoved, he awaited at every instant the precise moment to attack or to fall back, and when that happened his troops left the land leveled, not a tree standing. The whites who were unable to find refuge under Leclerc's protection were massacred. In April, yellow fever fell like another curse upon the French troops, so little accustomed to the climate and defenseless against the epidemic. Of the seventeen thousand men Leclerc had at the beginning of the expedition, seven thousand were left in lamentable condition; of the remainder, five thousand were dying and another five thousand were in the ground. Again Toussaint was grateful for the timely aid of Macandal's winged armies.

Napoleon sent reinforcements, and in June another three thousand soldiers and officers died of the same fever; there was not enough lime to cover the bodies in the mass graves, where vultures and dogs tore the bodies apart. However, that same month, Toussaint's z'etoile burned out in the firmament. The general fell into a trap set by the French under the pretext of a parley; he was arrested and deported to France with his family. Napoleon had conquered the "greatest Negro general of history," as he was defined. Leclerc announced that the only way to restore peace would be to kill every black in the mountains and half those in the plains, men and women, and to leave alive only children under twelve, but he was not able to execute his plan because he fell ill.

The white emigres in New Orleans, including the monarchists, toasted Napoleon, the invincible, as Toussaint Louverture was slowly dying in an icy cell in a fort in the Alps, at two thousand nine hundred meters near the Swiss border. In Saint-Domingue the war continued, inexorable, through 1802, and very few realized that in that brief campaign Leclerc lost nearly thirty thousand men before he himself perished of the same yellow fever in November. The Premier Consul promised to send another thirty thousand soldiers to the island.

One winter afternoon in 1803, Dr. Parmentier and Tete were talking on Adele's patio, where they often met. Three years before, when the doctor saw Tete in the Valmorains' house, shortly after he'd arrived from Cuba, he had given her Gambo's message. He told her of the circumstances under which they'd met, his horrible wounds, and the long convalescence that had allowed them to get acquainted. He also told her about how the brave capitaine had helped him get away from Saint-Domingue when that was nearly impossible. "He said for you not to wait for him, Tete, because he had forgotten you, but if he sent you that message it is because he hadn't," the doctor had commented on that occasion. He supposed that Tete had freed herself from the ghost of that love. He had met Zacharie, and anyone could discern his feelings for Tete, though the doctor had never glimpsed between them those possessive gestures that signal intimacy. Perhaps the habit of caution and pretense that had served them in slavery had roots too deep. The Chez Fleur kept Zacharie very busy, and from time to time he also made trips to Cuba and other islands to stock up on liquors, cigars, and other necessities for his business. Tete was never prepared when he appeared at the house on the rue Chartres. Parmentier had met him several times when Violette invited him to dinner. He was friendly and formal, and always came with the classic almond tart to end the meal. With Parmentier, Zacharie talked politics, about which he was obsessive; with Sancho, bets, horses, and his fanciful businesses; and with the women, anything that delighted them. From time to time when Zacharie's partner, Fleur Hirondelle, came with him she seemed to have a curious affinity with Violette. She put her weapons down at the front door, sat to have tea in the little drawing room, and then disappeared inside the house, following Violette. The doctor could swear that she emerged without hair on her face, and once had seen her drop a vial into her powder pouch, surely perfume; he had heard Violette say that all women have a smattering of coquetry in their soul, and a few fragrant drops are enough to awaken it. Zacharie pretended to ignore his partner's weaknesses while he was waiting for Tete to get dressed to go out with him.

Once they took the doctor to the Chez Fleur, where he could appreciate Zacharie and Fleur Hirondelle in their normal surroundings and appreciate Tete's happiness dancing barefoot on the small circular floor in the bar. Just as he had imagined when he met her at the Habitation Saint-Lazare, when she was very young, Tete possessed a great reserve of sensuality, though at that time it had been hidden beneath her severe expression. Watching her dance, the physician concluded that being emancipated had changed not just her legal status but also liberated that aspect of her character.

In New Orleans, Parmentier's relationship with Adele was not unusual; several of his friends and patients kept families of color. For the first time the doctor did not have to resort to unworthy strategies to visit his wife-none of that sneaking around at dawn, taking a criminal's precautions not to be seen. He had dinner nearly every night with her, slept in her bed, and the next morning tranquilly returned to his consulting office at ten in the morning, deaf to any commentary he might arouse. He had acknowledged his children, who now bore his surname; the two boys were studying in France and the girl was with the Ursulines. Adele worked on her sewing and, as she always had, saved as much as she could. Two women helped her with Violette Boisier's corsets, armor reinforced with whalebone, which gave curves to the flattest woman and could not be seen, so dresses seemed to float over a naked body. The whites wondered how a style inspired by ancient Greece could look better on Africans than on them. Tete came and went between houses with patterns, measurements, cloth, corsets, and finished dresses, which Violette was then responsible for selling among her clients.

One evening Parmentier sat talking with Tete and Adele on the patio of the bougainvillea, at that time of year pale bare sticks without flowers or leaves.

"Toussaint Louverture died seven months ago. Another of Napoleon's crimes. They killed him with hunger, cold, and loneliness in the prison, but he will not be forgotten; the general made his way into history," said the doctor.

They were drinking sherry after a meal of catfish and vegetables, since among her many virtues Adele was a fine cook. The patio was the most agreeable place in the house, even on cool nights like that one. A faint light shone from a brazier that Adele had lit to make charcoal for ironing and for keeping the small circle of friends warm.