Isabel Allende - Island Beneath the Sea

In the drawing room of the house, Jean-Martin saw a girl dressed in blue playing the piano with a cup on her head. "Rosette! Look who's here! My boy, my Jean-Martin!" Loula screeched in introduction. Rosette interrupted her musical exercises and slowly turned. They greeted each other, he with a stiff nod and click of his heels and she with a fluttering of her giraffe eyelashes. "Welcome, monsieur. Not a day goes by that madame and Loula do not speak of you," said Rosette with the forced courtesy learned from the Ursulines. Nothing could be more true. The memory of the young man floated through the house like a ghost, and from hearing about him so often Rosette already knew him.

Loula took Rosette's cup and went to tend to the coffee, and her exclamations of joy blasted in from the patio. Rosette and Jean-Martin, sitting in silence on the edge of their chairs, cast furtive glances at each other with the feeling they had met before. Twenty minutes later, when Jean-Martin was on his third piece of pastry, Violette came panting in, with Tete close behind. Jean-Martin thought his mother looked more beautiful than he remembered, and did not wonder why she was coming from mass with her hair in a tangle and dress badly buttoned.

From the doorway Tete watched the uncomfortable youth with amusement as Loula pinched his cheeks and his mother kissed and kissed him without letting go of his hand. The salt winds of the crossing had darkened Jean-Martin's skin several tones, and the years of military formation had reinforced the stiffness inspired by the man he thought was his father. He remembered Etienne Relais as strong, stoic, and severe, and for that treasured even more the tenderness he had showered on him in the strict intimacy of the home. His mother and Loula, on the other hand, had always treated him like a baby, and apparently would continue to do so. To compensate for his pretty face, he always kept an exaggerated distance, an icy posture, and that stony expression military men tend to have. In his childhood he'd had to put up with being mistaken for a girl, and in adolescence his schoolmates taunted him or fell in love with him. Those family caresses in front of Rosette and the mulatta, whose name he hadn't caught, embarrassed him, but he did not dare reject them. Tete did not notice that Jean-Martin had the same features as Rosette, she had always thought her daughter resembled Violette Boisier, and that seemed to have been accentuated in the months of training for the placage, during which the girl imitated her teacher's mannerisms.

In the meantime, Morisset had gone to the blacksmith shop on Saint Philip Street, which he had found out was a screen for illegal transactions; he did not, however, find the person he was looking for. He was tempted to leave a note for Jean Lafitte asking for a meeting and reminding him of the relationship they had developed over a chessboard, but realized that would be a major mistake. He had been spying for three months, posing as a scientist, and still was not used to the caution his mission demanded; at every turn he surprised himself on the verge of being imprudent. Later that same day, when Jean-Martin introduced him to his mother, his precautions seemed ridiculous, she offered quite casually to introduce him to the pirates. They were in the drawing room of the yellow house, which had become a little crowded with the family and those who had come to meet Jean-Martin: Dr. Parmentier, Adele, Sancho, and some neighbor women.

"I understand that they've put a price on the Lafittes' heads," said the spy.

"That's something the Americans are doing, Monsieur Moriste!" Violette laughed.

"Morisset. Isidor Morisset, madame."

"The Lafittes are highly esteemed because they sell at a good price. It would never occur to any of us to turn them in for the five hundred dollars offered for their heads," intervened Sancho Garcia del Solar.

He added that Pierre had a reputation for being crude, but Jean was a gentleman from head to toe, gallant with the women and courteous with men; he spoke five languages, wrote with impeccable style, and entertained with the most generous hospitality. He was of often tested courage, and his men, who numbered nearly three thousand, would die for him.

"Tomorrow is Saturday, and there will be an auction. Would you like to go to the Temple?" Violette asked.

"The Temple, you say?"

"That is where they have the auctions," Parmentier clarified.

"If everyone knows where they are, why haven't they been arrested?" Jean-Martin put in.

"No one dares. Claiborne has asked for reinforcement because those men are something to be feared; their law is violence, and they are better equipped than the army."

The next day Violette, Morisset, and Jean-Martin went on an outing, provided with a basket containing a lunch and two bottles of wine. Violette arranged to leave Rosette behind using the pretext of piano exercises; she had noticed that Jean-Martin was looking at her rather too frequently, and her duty as mother was to prevent any inconvenient fantasy. Rosette was her best student, perfect for the placage, but absolutely inadequate for her son, who needed to enter the Societe du Cordon Bleu by way of a good marriage. She intended to choose her daughter-in-law with an unswerving sense of reality, without giving Jean-Martin the opportunity to commit sentimental errors. As they left, Tete was added to the party. She climbed into the boat at the last minute with some misgivings because she was suffering the usual nausea of the first months of pregnancy, and she was also afraid of the caimans and snakes that infested the water, and others that sometimes fell from overhead branches of the mangroves. The fragile boat was steered by an oarsman who knew his way with his eyes closed in that labyrinth of canals, islands, and swamps eternally enshrouded in pestilent vapors and clouds of mosquitoes-ideal for illegal traffic and imaginative felons.

The Temple turned out to be an island in the swamps of the delta, a compact mound of shells ground by time, with a forest of oaks that once had been a sacred site of the Indians and still held the remains of one of their altars; the name derived from that. The brothers Lafitte had been there since early morning, as they were every Saturday of the year, unless it fell on Christmas or the Virgin's Ascension. Along the shore were lined up flat bottom skiffs, fishing boats, pirogues, canoes, small private boats with awnings for the ladies and rough barges for transporting products.

The pirates had set up several canvas tents, in which they exhibited their treasures and distributed free lemonade for the ladies, Kentucky whiskey for the men, and sweets for the children. The air smelled of stagnant water and the spicy fried crawfish served on corn husks. There was a spirit of carnival, with musicians, jugglers, and a show with trained dogs. A few slaves were on display on a platform, four adults and a naked little boy about two or three years old. Interested parties were examining their teeth to calculate age, the whites of their eyes to check health, and their anuses to be sure they were not stuffed with tow, the most common trick for hiding diarrhea. A mature woman with a lace parasol was weighing with gloved hand the genitals of one of the males.

Pierre Lafitte had already begun the auction of merchandise, which at first view lacked any logic, as if it had been selected with the single purpose of confusing the shoppers, a mixture of crystal lamps, bags of coffee, women's clothing, weapons, boots, bronze statues, jam, pipes and razors, silver teapots, sacks of pepper and cinnamon, furniture, paintings, vanilla, church goblets and candelabra, crates of wine, a tame monkey, and two parrots. No one left without buying; the Lafittes also acted as bankers and lenders. Every object was exclusive, as Pierre shouted at the top of his lungs, and should be, since it all came from boarding merchant ships on the high seas. "Look what we have here, mesdames and messieurs, see this porcelain vase worthy of a royal palace! And what will you give for this brocade cape bordered in ermine! You won't have a chance like this again!" The public responded with clowning and whistling, but the bids kept rising with an entertaining rivalry, which Pierre knew how to exploit.