Island Beneath the Sea

"My loas are always with me, Maurice, but now I go to Pere Antoine's mass as well."

  "How can love be a sin? God put it on us. Before we were born, we already loved each other. We aren't guilty because we have the same father. The sin isn't ours, it's his."

  "There are consequences..." Tete murmured.

  "I know that. Everyone insists on telling me that we can have abnormal children. We are ready to run that risk, aren't we, Rosette?"

  The girl didn't answer. Maurice went to her and put an arm around her shoulders in a protective gesture.

  "What will become of the two of you?" Tete asked with anguish.

  "We are free and young. We will go to Boston, and if things do not go well we will look for another place. America is very large."

  "And her color? You will not be accepted anywhere. They say that in the free states the hatred is worse, and that blacks and whites do not live or mix together."

  "True, but that is going to change, I promise. There are many people working to abolish slavery: philosophers, politicians, church people, every person with any decency..."

  "I will not live to see it, Maurice. But I know that even if the slaves are emancipated, there will be no equality."

  "Over time there will have to be, Maman. It's like a snowball that when it begins to roll grows larger, faster, and then no one can stop it. That is how the great changes in history take place."

  "Who told you that, son?" Tete asked, who was not sure what snow was.

  "My teacher, Harrison Cobb."

  Tete realized that it was useless to reason; the cards had been thrown fifteen years before, when he leaned over for the first time to kiss the face of the newborn baby Rosette.

  "Don't worry, we will work it out," Maurice added. "But we need your blessing, Maman. We don't want to run away like bandits."

  "You have my blessings, children, but that isn't enough. We will go and ask Pere Antoine's advice; he knows things about this world and the other," Tete concluded.

  They went hurrying through the February breeze to the priest's little house. He had just finished his first round of charity and was resting a bit. He welcomed them with no hint of surprise; he had been waiting for them ever since the gossip had reached his ears that the heir to the Valmorain fortune was going to marry a quadroon. As he was always au courant with everything that happened in the city, his faithful believed the Holy Spirit whispered information to him. He offered them his mass wine, harsh as varnish.

  "We want to marry, mon pere," Maurice announced.

  "But the small detail of race is there, is that not it?" The priest smiled.

  "We know that the law..." Maurice continued.

  "Have you committed the sin of the flesh?" Pere Antoine again interrupted.

  "How could you believe that, mon pere? I give you my word as a gentleman that Rosette's virtue and my honor are intact," Maurice proclaimed, startled.

  "What a shame, my children! If Rosette had lost her virginity, and you wanted to repair the harm you perpetrated, I would be obliged to marry you to save your souls," the saint explained.

  Then Rosette spoke for the first time since the Cordon Bleu ball.

  "That can be arranged this very night, mon pere. Pretend that it has already happened. And now, please, save our souls," she said, flushed and sounding determined.

  The saint possessed an admirable flexibility in getting around rules he considered inconvenient. With the same childish imprudence with which he defied the church, he often chopped a little off the body of the law, and until that moment no religious or civil authority had dared call attention to him. He took a barber's razor out of a box, wet the blade in his glass of wine, and ordered the lovers to roll up their sleeves and hold out an arm. Without hesitation he cut a slit on Maurice's wrist with the dexterity of someone who has performed the operation several times. Maurice grunted and sucked the cut while Rosette pressed her lips together and closed her eyes with her hand still outstretched. The priest joined their arms, rubbing Rosette's blood into Maurice's small wound.

  "Blood is always red, as you see, but if anyone asks, now you can say that you have black blood, Maurice. So the wedding will be legal," the priest explained, wiping the knife on his sleeve as Tete tore her kerchief to bandage their wrists.

  "Let us go into the church. I will ask Sister Lucie to be witness to this impromptu marriage," said Pere Antoine.

  "Just a minute, mon pere." Tete held him back. "We have not resolved the fact that these children are half siblings."

  "But what are you saying, daughter?" the saint exclaimed.

  "You know Rosette's story, mon pere; I told you that Monsieur Toulouse Valmorain was the father, and you know he is also the father of Maurice."

  "I didn't remember, my memory is bad." Pere Antoine dropped into a chair, defeated. "I cannot marry these young ones, Tete. It is one thing to mock human law, which can be absurd, but something different to mock the law of God...."

  With lowered heads they left Pere Antoine's little house. Rosette was trying to contain her tears, and Maurice, upset, was supporting her, his arm around her waist. "How I wanted to help you, my children! But it is not in my power to do so. No one can marry you in this land," was the saint's sorrowful farewell. As the lovers dragged along, disconsolate, Tete walked two steps behind, thinking of the emphasis Pere Antoine had placed on that last word. Perhaps it wasn't emphasis but something she confused with the strong accent of the Spanish priest's French, but to her the sentence didn't seem natural, and she heard it again and again like an echo of her bare feet slapping on the tiles of the square, until from being repeated so often in silence she thought she understood a coded meaning. She changed direction to head toward the Chez Fleur.

  They walked almost an hour, and when they came to the modest door of the gaming house they saw a line of porters with boxes of liquors and provisions, overseen by Fleur Hirondelle, who noted down each bundle in her account book. The woman greeted them with affection, as always, but could not pay attention to them and gestured toward the salon. Maurice was aware that this was a place of questionable reputation, and it seemed amusing to him that his maman, always so concerned about decency, would behave here as if in her own house. At that hour, in the cruel light of day, with the tables empty, bare of customers, cocottes, and musicians, without the smoke, noise, and smell of perfume and liquor, the salon resembled a tawdry theater.

  "What are we doing here?" Maurice asked in a funereal tone.

  "Waiting for our luck to change, son," said Tete.

  Moments later Zacharie appeared in his work clothes, his hands filthy, surprised by the visit. He was no longer the handsome man he had been; his face was like a Carnival mask. That was how he'd looked since being attacked. It had been night, and he was beaten unmercifully; he had not seen the men who came at him with clubs, but as they did not steal his money or the walking stick with the ivory handle, he knew they were not bandits from Le Marais. Tete had warned him more than once that his overly elegant figure and generosity were offensive to some whites. He was found in time, tossed into a drain, hammered to a pulp, his face destroyed. Doctor Parmentier had treated him with such care that he had been able to set his bones in place and save one eye, and Tete had fed him through a tube until he could chew. The assault had not changed his triumphant attitude, but it had made him more prudent, and now he was always armed.

  "What can I do for you? Rum? Fruit juice for the little girl?" Zacharie smiled his new twisted smile.

  "A captain is like a king--he can do what he wants on his boat, even hang someone. Isn't that true?" Tete asked.

  "Only when on the high seas," Zacharie clarified, cleaning himself with a rag.

  "Do you know someone like that?"

  "Several. Without going too far, Fleur Hirondelle and I are associated with a man named Romeiro Toledano, a Portugese who owns a small schooner."

  "Associated to do what, Zacharie?"

  "Let's say importing and transporting...."

 
"You never mentioned any Toledano to me. Can he be trusted?"

  "That depends: for some things yes, for others, no."

  "Where can I speak with him?"

  "At this moment the schooner is in the port. Surely he will come tonight to have some drinks and play a few hands. What is it you want, woman?"

  "I need a captain to marry Maurice and Rosette," Tete announced, to the amazement of the two listening.

  "How can you ask that of me, Zarite!"

  "Because no one else will do it, Zacharie. And it has to be right now, because Maurice is going to Boston on a ship that leaves the day after tomorrow."

  "The schooner is in port. The land authorities are in command here."

  "Can you ask your Toledano to lift anchor, move his ship a few miles out to sea, and marry them? Fleur Hirondelle and I will be witnesses."

  And so, four hours later, aboard a deplorable schooner flying a Cuban flag, Captain Romeiro Toledano, a small man only a little over a meter and a half tall, who compensated for the indignity of his stature with a black beard that barely left his eyes in view, married Rosette Sedella and Maurice Solar, as the young man had called himself since he broke with his father. Witnesses to the wedding were Zacharie in his gala trappings, but still with dirty fingernails, and Fleur Hirondelle, who for the occasion had put on a long bearskin coat and a necklace of the teeth of the same animal. While Zarite dried her tears, Maurice took off his mother's gold medal he always wore and put it around Rosette's neck. Fleur Hirondelle handed out goblets of champagne, and Zacharie made a toast: "To this symbolic couple of the future, when races will be mixed and all human beings will be free and equal under the law." Maurice, who had often heard the same words from his teacher Cobb, and who had become very sentimental during his typhus attack, let out a long, deep sob.

  Two Nights of Love

  For lack of a more conventional place, the newlyweds spent their one day and two nights of love in the tight little cabin of Romeiro Toledano's schooner, never suspecting that in a secret compartment below the floor there was a crouched slave who could hear them. This ship was the first step in that fugitive's journey to freedom. Toledano, Zacharie, and Fleur Hirondelle believed that slavery was going to end soon, and in the meantime they helped the most desperate, who could not wait until that time.

  That night, Maurice and Rosette made love on a narrow bunk of planks, rocked by the sea in light filtered through the worn red felt that covered the little porthole. At first they touched tentatively, timidly, even though they had grown up exploring one another, and not a single nook of their souls was closed to the other. They had changed, and now they had to learn to know each other again. Before the marvel of having Rosette in his arms, Maurice forgot the little he had learned in his prancing with Giselle, the lying seductress of Savannah. He trembled. "It's from the typhus," he said by way of apology. Moved by that sweet clumsiness, Rosette took the initiative and began slowly to take off her clothes, as Violette Boisier had taught her privately. Thinking about that sent her into such a fit of laughing that Maurice thought she was making fun of him.

  "Don't be silly, Maurice, how can I be making fun of you?" she told him, drying the tears of her laughter. "I am remembering the classes on making love that Madame Violette offered to the students of placage."

  "Don't tell me she gave you classes!"

  "Of course--did you think that seduction is improvised?"

  "Maman knows this?"

  "Not the details."

  "What was that woman teaching you girls?"

  "Not much, because soon madame had to stop the practical classes. Loula convinced her that the mothers would not tolerate it, and the ball would go to the devil. But she got in lessons for me. She used bananas and cucumbers to explain."

  "Explain what!" Maurice exclaimed. He was beginning to find it amusing.

  "How you men are, and how easy it is to manipulate you because you have everything outside. She had to teach me somehow, don't you see? I have never seen a naked man, Maurice. Well, just you, but you were a little boy then."

  "Let's suppose that something has changed since then." He smiled. "But don't be expecting bananas or cucumbers. You'd be committing the sin of optimism."

  "Oh? Let me see."

  In his hiding place, the slave lamented that there wasn't a hole between the planks of the deck that he could look through. After the laughing followed a silence that seemed too long to him. What could those two be doing, and be so quiet? He couldn't imagine; in his experience love was much noisier. When the bearded captain opened the trapdoor to let him out to eat and stretch his bones, taking advantage of the noise from all the people gambling and drinking and the darkness of night, the runaway was at the point of telling him not to bother, he could wait.

  Romeiro Toledano foresaw that the newly married pair, in accord with reigning custom, would not come out of their retreat. And following instuctions given by Zacharie, he took them coffee and pastries and set them discreetly at the door of the cabin. In normal circumstances Maurice and Rosette would have spent at least three days closed in the room, but they did not have that much time. Later the good captain left them a tray with delicious food from the Marche Francais Tete had sent: shellfish, cheese, warm bread, fruit, sweets, and a bottle of wine that hands quickly pulled inside.

  In the too short hours of the one day and two nights that Rosette and Maurice had together, they made love with the tenderness they had shared in childhood and the passion that now inflamed them, improvising one thing and then another to please each other. They were very young, they had been in love forever, and there was the terrible incentive of parting: they did not need instructions from Violette Boisier. During some intervals they took time to talk, never breaking their embrace, of things unfinished and of their immediate future. The only thing that made it possible for them to endure the separation was the certainty that they would be together as soon as Maurice found work and a place where Rosette would be comfortable.

  At dawn on the second day they dressed, kissed for the last time, and cautiously went out to face the world. The schooner was again anchored, and in the port Zacharie and Tete and Sancho were waiting with Maurice's trunk. The uncle also handed his nephew four hundred dollars, which he boasted he had won in a single night of playing cards. The youth had bought his passage using his new name, Maurice Solar, the abbreviated surname of his mother, which he pronounced "Soler" in English. That bothered Sancho a little, who was proud of the sonorous Garcia del Solar, pronounced as it should be, So-lar.

  Rosette was left behind on land, brokenhearted inside but feigning the serene attitude of someone who has everything she could want in this world, while Maurice waved to her from the deck of the clipper that would take him to Boston.

  Purgatory

  Valmorain lost his son and his health at a single blow. At the same moment that Maurice left the paternal house, never to return, something broke inside him. When Sancho and the others were able to get him up from the floor, they found that one side of his body was dead. Dr. Parmentier determined that his heart was not damaged, as Valmorain had always feared, but that he had suffered a stroke. He was nearly paralyzed, he was drooling, and he had lost control of his sphincter. "With time and a little luck you can improve a lot, mon ami, although you will never be the same as you were," Parmentier told him. He added that he knew patients who had lived many years after a similar attack. By signs, Valmorain indicated that he wanted to talk to him alone, and Hortense Guizot, who was watching him like an owl, had to leave the room and close the door. His sputterings were nearly incomprehensible, but Parmentier was able to understand that he feared his wife more than his illness. There was no doubt that Hortense would rather be left a widow than take care of an invalid who peed on himself, and she might be tempted to precipitate his death. "Do not worry, I will take care of that with only a few words," Parmentier assured him.

  The doctor gave Hortense Guizot the medications and necessary instructions for the ill man
, and advised her to find a good nurse; the recovery of her husband depended very much on the care he received. They should not contradict him or worry him: calm was fundamental. As they said good-bye, he held the woman's hand in an attitude of paternal consolation. "I want your husband to come out of this difficulty well, madame, because I do not believe that Maurice is prepared to take his place," he said. And he reminded her that Valmorain had not had an opportunity to change his will, and legally Maurice was still the family's single heir.

  Two days later, a messenger handed Tete a note from the Valmorains. She did not wait for Rosette to read it for her but went directly to Pere Antoine. Everything having to do with her former master had the power to knot her stomach with apprehension. She supposed that by then Valmorain had learned about the hurried wedding and his son's departure, the whole city knew, and his anger would be directed not against Maurice alone, whom gossips had already absolved--as the victim of black witchcraft--but against Rosette. She was guilty of causing the Valmorain dynasty to be cut off, ended without glory. After the patriarch's death, his fortune would pass into the hands of the Guizots, and the surname Valmorain would appear nowhere but on the stone in the mausoleum, since his daughters could not pass it down to their descendents. There were many reasons to fear Valmorain's vengeance, but that idea had not occurred to Tete until Sancho suggested she watch Rosette and not let her go out alone. What did he want to warn her of? Her daughter spent the day with Adele, sewing her modest new bride's trousseau and writing to Maurice. She was safe there, and Tete herself always went to pick her up at night, but they were forever on edge, always alert: the long arm of her former master could reach very far.

  The note she received consisted of two lines from Hortense Guizot, notifying her that her husband needed to speak with her.

  "It must have cost that prideful woman a lot to call upon you," the priest commented.

  "I would rather not go to that house, mon pere."