Isabel Allende - Island Beneath the Sea

In 1805, Maurice's last year of school, it was not Sancho who came for him, as he had before, but his father. Maurice deduced that he was there to announce some bad news and was afraid for Tete or Rosette, but it wasn't anything like that, it seemed. Valmorain had organized a trip to France to visit a grandmother and two hypothetical aunts his son had never heard mentioned. "And then we will go home, monsieur?" Maurice had asked, thinking of Rosette, whose letters lined the bottom of his trunk. He had written her one hundred ninety-three letters without a thought for the inevitable changes she had experienced in those nine years they'd been apart; he remembered her as the little girl dressed in ribbons and laces that he'd seen for the last time shortly before his father's marriage to Hortense Guizot. He couldn't imagine her at fifteen, just as she couldn't think of him as eighteen. "Of course we'll go home, son, your mother and sisters are waiting to see you," Valmorain lied.

The journey on a ship that had to skirt summer storms and with difficulty escape an attack by the English, and then a coach to Paris, did not bring the father and son together. Valmorain had conceived the trip in order to postpone for a few months more his wife's displeasure at seeing Maurice again, but he couldn't put it off indefinitely; soon he would have to confront a situation that had not been eased by the years. Hortense never lost a chance to spew venom upon that stepson whom each year she tried vainly to replace with her own son without producing anything but girls. For her, Valmorain had exiled Maurice from the family, and now he repented. A decade had gone by without a serious concern for his son; he was always occupied with his own affairs, first in Saint-Domingue, then in Louisiana, and last with Hortense and the births of the girls. The boy was a stranger who answered his sparse letters in a couple of formal sentences regarding the progress of his studies but he never asked about any member of the family; it was as if he wanted to leave it settled that he had no connection to them. He didn't even react when his father wrote him in a single line that Tete and Rosette had been emancipated and were no longer connected to the Valmorains.

Valmorain was afraid he'd lost his son at some point during those hectic years. This introverted young man, tall and handsome, with his mother's features, did not in any way resemble the rosy-cheeked boy he'd cradled in his arms, praying heaven to protect him from all harm. He loved him as much as he ever had, maybe more, because his emotion was stained with guilt. He tried to convince himself that his fatherly affection was returned by Maurice, even though they were temporarily distanced, but he had his doubts. He had laid out ambitious plans for his son without ever having asked him what he wanted to do with his life. In truth, he knew nothing about his interests or experiences; it was centuries since they had spoken. He wanted to win him back, and had imagined that those months alone together in France would act to establish an adult relationship. He had to prove to him his affection and to make clear that Hortense and her daughters would not change Maurice's situation as his only heir, but every time he tried to broach the subject there was no response. "The tradition of primogeniture is very wise, Maurice; wealth must not be divided among sons because with each division the family's fortune is lessened. Being the firstborn, you will receive my entire estate, and you will have to look after your sisters. When I'm no longer here, you will be the head of the Valmorains. It's time to start preparing you; you will learn to invest money, manage the plantation, and make your way in society," he told him. Silence. Conversations died before they began. Valmorain navigated from one monologue to another.

Maurice took in without comment Napoleonic France, always at war, the museums, palaces, parks, and avenues his father wanted to show him. They visited the ruined chateau where his grandmother was living out her last years, caring for two unwed daughters more deteriorated by time and loneliness than she. A prideful old woman dressed in Louis XVI style, determined to ignore the changes in the world, she was firmly ensconsed in the epoch prior to the French Revolution, and had erased from her memory the Terror, the guillotine, exile in Italy, and the return to an unrecognizable country. Seeing Toulouse Valmorain, that son absent for more than thirty years, she held out a bony hand with antique rings on each finger for him to kiss, and then ordered her daughters to serve chocolate. Valmorain introduced her grandson to her and tried to summarize his own story from the time he embarked for the Antilles up to the present. She listened without a word while the sisters offered steaming little cups and plates of stale pastries, eyeing Valmorain with caution. They remembered the frivolous young man who told them good-bye with a distracted kiss and left with his valet and several trunks to spend a few weeks with their father in Saint-Domingue, only never to return. They didn't recognize that brother with the scanty hair, double chin, and paunch, who spoke with a strange accent. They knew something of the uprising of slaves in the colony-they'd heard a few sentences here and there about atrocities on that decadent island, but they'd not connected them to a member of their family. They had never been curious to know where the funds that supported them came from. Bloodstained sugar, rebel slaves, burned plantations, exile, and all the rest their brother mentioned was as incomprehensible to them as a conversation in Chinese.

The mother, on the other hand, knew exactly what Valmorain was referring to, but now nothing interested her too much in this world; her heart was too dry for affection and news. She listened to him in an indifferent silence, and at the end, the one question she asked was if she could count on more money because what he regularly sent barely covered things. It was absolutely necessary to repair that house depleted by the years and vicissitudes, she said; she couldn't die leaving her daughters unsheltered. Valmorain and Maurice stayed inside those lugubrious walls for two days that seemed as long as two weeks. "We won't see each other again, better that way," were the elderly dame's words as she told her son and grandson good-bye.

Maurice docilely went everywhere with his father, except the classy brothel where Valmorain planned to fete him with the most expensive cocottes in Paris.

"What is it with you, son? This is normal and necessary. One must discharge the body's humors and clear the mind, that way one can concentrate on other things."

"I have no difficulty concentrating, monsieur."

"I've told you to call me Papa, Maurice. I suppose that in your trips with your Uncle Sancho…well, you wouldn't have been lacking for opportunities…"

"That is a private matter," Maurice interrupted.

"I hope that the American school hasn't made you religious or effeminate," his father commented in a jesting tone, but it came out with a growl.

The boy gave no explanations. Thanks to his uncle he wasn't a virgin; in the last vacation time Sancho had succeeded in initiating him, using an ingenious scheme dictated by necessity. He suspected that his nephew suffered the desires and fantasies proper for his age but was a romantic and was repelled by the idea of love reduced to a commercial transaction. It was up to him to help Maurice, he decided. They were in the prosperous port of Savannah, in Georgia, which Sancho wanted to know through the countless diversions it offered, and Maurice as well, because Professor Harrison Cobb had cited it as an example of negotiable morality.

Georgia, founded in 1733, was the thirteenth and last of the colonies founded in the new world and Savannah was its first city. The settlers maintained friendly relations with the indigenous tribes, thus avoiding the violence that was the scourge of other colonies. In the beginning, slavery-along with liquor and lawyers-was forbidden in Georgia, but soon it was realized that the climate and the quality of the soil were ideal for cultivating rice and cotton, and slavery was legalized. After independence, Georgia was converted into another state of the Union, and Savannah flourished as the port of entry for the traffic in Africans that supplied the region's plantations. "This demonstrates, Maurice, that decency quickly succumbs before greed. If it's a matter of getting rich, the majority of men will sacrifice their soul. You cannot imagine how well the planters in Georgia live, thanks to their slaves," Harrison Cobb had declared. The youth did not have to imagine it-he had lived in Saint-Domingue and New Orleans -and he accepted his uncle Sancho's suggestion that they spend their vacation in Savannah so as not to disappoint his teacher. "Love of justice is not enough to defeat slavery, Maurice; you have to see the reality and know in detail the laws and gears of politics," Cobb maintained, who was preparing his student to triumph where he himself had failed. The man knew his limitations; he had neither the temperament nor the health to fight in Congress, as he had dreamed of in his youth, but he was a good teacher; he knew how to recognize the talent of a student and to mold his character.