Island Beneath the Sea

  Hortense installed herself in a chamber decorated in imperial blue, in which she slept alone; neither she nor her husband had the custom of sleeping with someone, and after their suffocating honeymoon they needed their own space. Her childhood toys, horrid dolls with glass eyes and human hair, adorned her room, and her curly-haired little dogs slept on her bed, a piece of furniture three meters wide, with carved pillars, a canopy, cushions, curtains, fringe, and pompons, plus a petit-point head-board she had embroidered in the Ursulines' school. Above the bed hung the same silk sky and butterball angels her parents had given her for the wedding.

  The recent bride arose after lunch and spent two-thirds of her life in bed, from which she managed the destinies of others. Their first night as a married couple, while still in the paternal house, she welcomed her husband in a negligee with swan plumes around the neckline, very becoming, but deadly for him because the feathers produced an uncontrollable attack of sneezing. Such a bad beginning did not prevent the marriage from being consummated, and Valmorain had the agreeable surprise that his wife responded to his desires with more generosity than either Eugenia or Tete had ever demonstrated.

  Hortense was a virgin, but barely. In some way she had succeeded in escaping family vigilance and learned things that maidens had no knowledge of. The deceased fiance had gone to the grave without knowing she had surrendered to him with great ardor in her imagination, and would continue to do so in all the following years in the privacy of her bed, martyrized by unsatisfied desire and frustrated love. Her married sisters had provided basic information. They were not expert, but at least they knew that any man appreciates a certain show of enthusiasm, though not enough to arouse suspicion. Hortense decided on her own that neither she nor her husband were at an age for prudery. Her sisters told her that the best ways to dominate a husband were to play the fool and to please him in bed. The first would prove to be much more difficult than the second, for there was not one ounce of fool in her.

  Valmorain accepted his wife's sensuality as a gift, without asking questions whose answers he would rather not know. Hortense's remarkable body, with its hills and dales, reminded him of Eugenia before her madness, when she still overflowed her gown and naked seemed sculpted of almond paste: pale, soft, fragrant, nothing but abundance and sweetness. Later, the poor woman was reduced to a scarecrow figure, and he could embrace her only when desperate or stupefied with drink. In the golden splendor of the candles, Hortense was a delight to the eyes, the opulent nymph of mythological paintings. He felt his virility, which he had considered irreversibly diminished, reborn. His wife excited him as once Violette Boisier had done in her apartment on the place Clugny, and Tete in her voluptuous adolescence. He was amazed by his ardor, renewed every night, and even at times at midday, when he arrived unexpectedly, boots covered with mud, and surprised her embroidering among the pillows of her bed, expelled the dogs with one sweep of his hand, and fell upon her with the jubilation of again feeling eighteen. Once during his bucking and curveting a cupid from the sky of the bed broke loose and fell on the nape of his neck, stunning him for brief moments. He awaked covered in icy sweat because his old friend Lacroix had appeared in the fog of his unconsciousness to reclaim the treasure he'd stolen from him.

  Hortense exhibited the best side of her character in bed; she made little jokes, like crocheting a beautiful cone-shaped hat to tie around her husband's bayonet, and others darker, like inserting a chicken gut in her ass and telling him her intestines were falling out. From so much entanglement in the nun-initialed sheets the two ended by falling in love, just as she had forseseen. They were made for the complicity of marriage because they were essentially different; he was fearful, indecisive, and easy to manipulate, and she had the implacable determination he lacked. Together they would move mountains.

  Sancho, who had advocated marriage for his brother-in-law so strongly, was the first to understand Hortense's true character and repent. Outside her blue chamber, Hortense was a different person, mean, avaricious, and fastidious. Only music could elevate her, briefly, above her devastating common sense, illuminating her with an angelic brilliance and filling the house with tremulous trills that awed the slaves and provoked howls from the lapdogs. She had spent several years in the unpleasant role of spinster and was tired of being treated with barely hidden disdain; she wanted to be envied, and for that to happen, her husband would need to be highly placed. Valmorain would need a great deal of money to compensate for his lack of roots among old Creole families and the lamentable fact that he came from Saint-Domingue.

  Sancho proposed to keep the woman from destroying the brotherly camaraderie between him and his brother-in-law, and dedicated himself to flattering her with his smooth talk, but Hortense was immune to any squandering of charm that did not serve an immediate practical purpose. She did not like Sancho and kept him at a distance, though she treated him with courtesy in order not to wound her husband, whose weakness for his brother-in-law was to her incomprehensible. Why did he need Sancho? The plantation and the house in the city were his; he could rid himself of that partner who brought in nothing. "The plan to come to Louisiana was Sancho's, it occurred to him before the revolution in Saint-Domingue, and it was he who bought the land. I would not be here if it weren't for him," Valmorain explained when she asked. For her, that male loyalty was a useless and onerous sentimentality. The plantation was just getting under way; it would be at least three years before they could declare it a success, and meanwhile her husband was investing capital, working, and saving, while the other man lived like a duke. "Sancho is like my brother," Valmorain said, with an air of putting an end to the matter. "But he isn't," she replied.

  Hortense kept everything locked up, assuming that the servants all stole, and she imposed drastic economic measures that paralyzed the house. The little pieces of sugar they chiseled from the rock hard cone hanging from a hook in the ceiling were counted before being put in the sugar bowl, and someone kept count of how many were used. The food left over from the table was no longer shared among the slaves, as it always had been, but transformed into other dishes. Celestine grew more and more angry. "If they want to eat leftovers of leftovers and crumbs of crumbs, they don't need me, any Negro from the cane fields can serve them as cook," she announced. Her mistress could not abide Celestine, but word had spread about her garlic frog legs, roast chicken with orange, pork gumbo, and little mille-feuille baskets filled with crawfish, and when a couple of offers came to buy Celestine for an exorbitant price, she decided to leave her in peace and turn her attention to the field slaves. She calculated that they could gradually reduce their food to the degree they increased discipline, without drastically affecting productivity. If they'd had a good result with the mules, it would be worthwhile to try it with the slaves. Valmorain opposed those measures in principle because they did not coincide with his original project, but his wife argued that that was how it was done in Louisiana. Her plan lasted a week, until Owen Murphy erupted in a rage that shook the trees and the mistress grudgingly had to accept that the cane fields, like the kitchen of her house, were not her purview. Murphy won, but the tone of the plantation had changed. The house slaves went around on tiptoes, and the ones in the fields were afraid the mistress would dismiss Murphy.

  Hortense replaced and eliminated servants in an unending game of chess; one never knew whom to ask for something, and no one had a clear idea of duties. That irritated her, and she ended by lashing them with a coachman's whip she carried in her hand the way other women carry a fan. She convinced Valmorain to sell the majordomo and replace him with the slave she'd brought from her parents' house. That man ran around with handfuls of keys, spied on the other workers, and kept Hortense informed. The process of change did not take long because she had the unconditional approval of her husband, whom she would notify of her decisions between trapeze swings in bed. "Come over here, my love, and show me how seminarians ease their stress." Then, once the house was moving along as she wanted, Hortens
e got ready to confront three pending problems: Maurice, Tete, and Rosette.

  Zarite

  The master got married; he took his wife and Maurice to the plantation, and I was left for several months alone with Rosette in the house in the city. The children kicked and wept when they were separated and afterward went around peevish for weeks, blaming Madame Hortense. My daughter didn't know her but Maurice had described her, making fun of her songs, her little dogs, her dresses, and her ways; she was the witch, the intruder, the stepmother, the fat woman. He refused to call her Maman, and as his father would not allow him to address her in any other way he stopped speaking to her. He was compelled to greet her with a kiss, but always managed to leave traces of saliva or food on her face, until Madame Hortense herself liberated him from that obligation. Maurice wrote notes and collected little gifts for Rosette, which he sent via Don Sancho, and she answered with drawings and what words she knew how to write.

  It was a time of uncertainty, but also of freedom because there was no one to give me orders. Don Sancho spent a good part of his time in New Orleans, but he paid no attention to details; it was enough that I attended to the little he asked. He was entrapped by that quadroon for whom he had fought a duel, a certain Adi Soupir, and was with her more than with us. I asked around about her and did not like what I heard. At eighteen she already had the reputation of being frivolous, greedy, and of having plucked the fortunes of several suitors. This is what I was told. I did not dare warn Don Sancho, he would have been furious. In the mornings Rosette and I went to the Marche Francais where I mingled with the other slaves and sat in the shade to talk. Some cheated on their masters' change and bought a glass of lemonade, or a dozen fresh oysters with lime to squeeze over them, but there was no one to ask an accounting of me, and I didn't have to steal. That was before Madame Hortense came to live in the master's house. Many people noticed Rosette, who looked like a little girl from a good family in her taffeta dress and black patent high-button shoes. I have always liked the market, with its fruit and vegetable stands, the spicy fried food, the noisy crowd of shoppers, preachers and charlatans, filthy Indians selling baskets, mutilated beggars, tattooed pirates, priests and nuns, street musicians.

  One Wednesday I came to the market with my eyes swollen from crying all night from thinking about Rosette's future. My friends asked so often that finally I admitted the fears that had not let me sleep. The slave women advised me to get a gris-gris for protection, but I already had one of those amulets: a little sack of herbs, bones, my daughter's fingernails and mine, prepared by a voodoo priestess. It had not helped at all. Someone mentioned Pere Antoine, a Spanish priest with an enormous heart, who served the gentry and slaves equally. People adored him. "Go confess to him, he has magic," they told me. I had never confessed, because in Saint-Domingue the slaves had ended by paying for their sins in this world and not the next, but I had no one to go to, and for that reason I took Rosette to see him. I waited a good while; I was the last in the line of supplicants, each with her own guilt and petitions. When my turn came I didn't know what to do, I had never been so close to a Catholic houngan before. Pere Antoine was still young, but he had an old man's face: long nose, dark, kind eyes, beard like a horse's mane, and turtle feet in very worn sandals. He called us in with a gesture, lifted Rosette up, and sat her on his knees. My daughter did not resist, though he smelled of garlic and his dark brown habit was grimy.

  "Look, Maman! He has hairs in his nose and crumbs in his beard," Rosette commented, to my horror.

  "I am very ugly," he replied, laughing.

  "I am pretty," she said.

  "That is true, child, and in your case God forgives the sin of vanity."

  His French sounded like Spanish with a cold. After joking with Rosette for a few minutes, he asked how he could help me. I sent my daughter outside to play so she wouldn't hear. Erzulie, friend loa, forgive me, I wasn't planning to go to the Jesus of the whites, but the affectionate voice of Pere Antoine disarmed me and I began to cry again, even though I had cried most of the night. Tears never run out. I told him that our fate was hanging by a thread; the new mistress had a hard heart, and as soon as she suspected that Rosette was her husband's daughter she would take revenge not on him, but on us.

  "How do you know that, my daughter?" the priest asked.

  "Everything is known, mon pere."

  "No one knows the future, only God. At times what we most fear turns out to be a blessing. The doors of this church are always open, you can come whenever you want. Perhaps God will allow me to help you when the moment comes."

  "The god of the whites frightens me, Pere Antoine. He is crueler than Prosper Cambray."

  "Than who?"

  "The overseer of the plantation on Saint-Domingue. I am not a servant of Jesus, mon pere. My gods are the loas that came with my mother from Guinea. I belong to Erzulie."

  "Yes, daughter, I know your Erzulie." The priest smiled. "My God is the same as your Papa Bondye, but with a different name. Your loas are like my saints. There is room in the human heart for all the divinities."

  "Voodoo is forbidden in Saint-Domingue, mon pere."

  "Here you may follow your voodoo, my daughter, because no one cares as long as there is no scandal. Sunday is God's day--come to mass in the morning and in the afternoon go the place Congo to dance with your loas. What is the problem?"

  He handed me a filthy piece of cloth, his handkerchief, to wipe away my tears, but I preferred the hem of my skirt. When we were leaving, he told me about the Ursuline nuns. That same night I spoke with Don Sancho. This is how it was.

  A Time of Hurricanes

  Hortense Guizot was a whirlwind of renovation in Valmorain's life, for she filled him with optimism, the opposite of what the rest of the family and the people on the plantation felt. Some weekends the couple received guests in the country, following the custom of Creole hospitality, but the visits diminished and soon ended; Hortense's annoyance was evident when someone came without being invited. The Valmorains spent their days alone. Officially, Sancho lived with them, like so many other bachelors attached to a family, but they saw little of him. Sancho looked for reasons to avoid them, and Valmorain missed the camaraderie they'd always shared. Now he passed his hours playing cards with his wife, listening to her sing at the piano, or reading while she painted scene after scene of maidens in swings and little cats with balls of yarn. Hortense's crochet hook flew, making doilies to cover all available surfaces. She had delicate, plump, white hands with perfect fingernails, busy hands for labors of crocheting and embroidering, agile on the keys, audacious in love. They spoke very little, but they understood each other through affectionate gazes and kisses blown from one chair to another in the enormous dining hall where they ate alone. Sancho rarely appeared, and Hortense had suggested that Maurice, when he was with them, should have his food with his tutor in the gazebo in the garden, if the weather permitted, or in the everyday dining room, and in that way take advantage of that time to continue his lessons. Maurice was nine years old but he acted like a baby, according to Hortense, who had a dozen nieces and nephews and considered herself an expert in raising children. He needed to be around boys of his social class and not just those Murphys, so common. He was very spoiled, and he acted like a girl; he should be exposed to the rigors of life, she said.

  Valmorain, rejuvenated, shaved off his sideburns and lost a little weight between his nocturnal acrobatics and the meager servings given him at table. He had found the conjugal happiness he had never had with Eugenia. Even his fear of a slave uprising, which had pursued him from Saint-Domingue, was pushed to the background. The plantation did not keep him from sleep because Owen Murphy's efficiency was ever to be praised; what he did not get done he turned over to his adolescent son Brandan, who was robust like his father and practical like his mother, and had worked on horseback since he was six.

  Leanne Murphy had given birth to a seventh baby, identical to his brothers, robust and black-haired, but she took t
ime to look after the slave hospital, going there every day with her baby in a little cart. She could not bear the sight of her employer. The first time Hortense tried to meddle in Leanne's territory, the Irishwoman planted herself in front of her with her arms crossed and an expression of icy calm on her face. That was how she had dominated the Murphy clan for more than fifteen years, and it also worked with Hortense. If the manager had not been such a good employee Hortense would have sent all of them packing just to crush that Irish insect, but she was more interested in production. Her father, a planter with antiquated ideas, said that sugar had maintained the Guizots for generations and they had no need to experiment, but she had discussed the advantages of cotton with the American agronomist and, like Sancho, was considering the advantages of cultivating that crop. She could not do it without Owen Murphy.

  A strong August hurricane flooded a large part of New Orleans--nothing serious, it often happened, and no one was too disturbed when the streets turned into canals and dirty water ran across their patios. Life went on as always, except that it was wet. That year the damages were few; only the destitute dead emerged from their graves to float in a muddy soup, while the wealthy dead in their mausoleums continued to rest in peace without being exposed to the indignity of losing bones to the jaws of vagrant dogs. In some streets water reached up to the knees, and several men found jobs transporting people on their backs from one place to another, while children had fun splashing around in puddles filled with rubbish and horse dung.

  Physicians, always alarmists, warned there would be a terrible epidemic, but Pere Antoine organized a procession with the Most Holy in the lead and no one dared make fun of that method for dominating the climate because it always had a good result. By then the priest was already thought of as a saint, even though he'd been in the city only three years. He had lived there briefly in 1790 when the Inquisition sent him to New Orleans with the mission of expelling Jews, castigating heretics, and propagating the faith with blood and fire, but he had no tint of fanaticism and was happy when the indignant citizens of Louisiana, little prepared to tolerate an inquisitor, sent him to Spain without further thought. He returned in 1795 as rector of the St. Louis Cathedral, recently constructed after the previous one had burned. He arrived ready to tolerate the Jews, to turn a blind eye to heretics, and to propagate faith with compassion and charity. He treated everyone the same, without distinguishing among free and slaves, criminals and exemplary citizens, virtuous women and others of the merry persuasion, thieves, buccaneers, lawyers, hangmen, usurers, and excommunicants. They all fit elbow to elbow in his church. The bishops detested him for being insubordinate, but the flock of his faithful loyally defended him. This Pere Antoine, with his Capuchin habit and apostle's beard, was the spiritual torch of that sinful city. The day after his procession the water receded from the streets, and that year there was no epidemic.