All Souls' Rising (40 page)

“What have you done all the day?” she said.

The doctor was looking at his watch and counting. “I went to the cove,” he said.

“What did you do there?” Her eyes were closed, long black lashes shadowing her cheek.

“I swam, and sat upon the beach…” Her image sharply appeared to him, naked and slender, graceful and erect, walking slowly out into the still water as if all unaware that it was not her natural element. He cast about for something else to tell her.

“I sat so quietly there the crabs came out to look at me. A little gray crab with his eyes on stalks came as near to me as I am to you. I winked at him and he put his eye down on one side…”

He was still holding her by the wrist; of a sudden she reversed the grip and drew his arm up to her face. She kissed the point of the wound, then traced the length of the healing scar with her tongue’s catlike tip. The doctor trembled. She was smiling, her eyes still closed. He was alive with desire for her, but with her condition so advanced—it was impossible. Gently he disengaged his arm.

A flicker of disturbance crossed her face and her eyes opened. She caught his hand again and moved it to the high rise of her belly.

“No,” she said, as he stiffened to withdraw. “Only feel him.”

She dragged up the skirt of her nightgown under the sheet, tucking it up beneath her swollen breasts, and shifted his hand against her drum-tight skin. Something bulged into his palm and rolled away: a foot, an elbow maybe.

“Does he hurt you?”

“No.”

The doctor lowered his head and flattened his ear against her belly. The skin was very smooth and warm. Listening for a second heartbeat, he closed his eyes. The susurrus of her inner currents recalled for him the sound of the ocean licking on the shore. When he opened his eyes again he saw Isabelle Cigny standing in the doorway, looking down on them with an ironical smile. He sat up sharply, jostling against the table. The orchid shivered in the vase.

Madame Cigny remained where she was, one hand on the door frame, her expression fixed. She seemed disposed neither to speak nor to leave them in privacy. The doctor cleared his throat.

“Best that you sleep now,” he said, in a quasi-professional tone. He stroked his fingers briefly across Nanon’s forehead, then reached to lower the wick of the lamp.

When he stood up, Madame Cigny moved out of the doorway. He followed her down the turning of a stair, into a room he’d never seen before. It was small and close, the windows curtained, fabric hangings covering the walls. He noticed a low daybed of the sort Nanon had kept in the rooms she occupied before the riots, this one covered with a fringed silken shawl. As Madame Cigny did not sit down, he also remained standing.

“The patient is well, I trust?” she said.

“To the best of my estimation.”

“You are a most attentive physician. I would hope to secure your services to myself,” she smiled, “should I be so misfortunate as to lose my health.”

“Why madame, your health is radiant,” the doctor said perfunctorily.

“You are kind.” Madame Cigny relaxed her manner slightly. She caught her lower lip in her top teeth and released it to a little blush.

“My friend,” she said, “believe me, I know everything you must be suffering at such a time as this—”

“I don’t think I understand you,” said the doctor. Before he could quite complete the sentence, she had slipped within his boundary. He overbalanced, dropping backward onto the daybed. This was sheer surprise, for her weight was nothing, she was not half the size of Nanon. Her mouth had opened his, her cool tongue darted and fluttered like the hummingbird. He felt her nails on the back of his neck. Her other hand had opened his trousers all unaided; the doctor was astonished at this dexterity. She cupped his testicles as though she’d weigh them, then milked his member upward with a languid, confident stroke. The doctor tore his mouth from hers, so as to moan. With that she sat up and away from him. He opened his eyes and moved to reach for her, but she was prim, unruffled, the cunning hands neatly folded in her lap.

“There is something you must know,” she said. “Who marries a black woman becomes black. Do you understand it?”

The doctor stared. She stretched out her hand and flicked the head of his penis with her middle nail. It rebounded, ticking back and forth like the wand of a metronome.

“Be careful how far you are led by
ce monsieur-la
,” she said. “He is not always a wise instructor.” She smiled at him, crisply, distantly, stood up and smoothed her skirts and left the room.

The doctor sagged back on his elbows. His breathing echoed off the masked walls of the room like the sound of a saw on a barrel. He waited for his erection to subside but it would not. After all, it was a stupid thing; thus far Madame Cigny was absolutely right. When a couple of minutes had gone by with no change in his condition, he crammed it back into his breeches and returned to the more public areas of the house.

Chapter Twenty-Five

C
LAUDINE
A
RNAUD WAITED IN
M
ADAME
C
IGNY’S PARLOR
; she accepted coffee, suffered a biscuit to be laid on her plate. There was conversation in which she joined without attending to what was asked of her or what she said in answer. She nibbled the edges of a piece of fruit…At length the little doctor crept down from the upper story where he had been attending his pregnant mulatto
demimondaine
. He seemed to be in some confusion, lit uneasily on the edge of the chair where Isabelle Cigny bade him sit, declined all refreshment offered him, and excused himself in rather a shorter time than politeness should have dictated. Madame Arnaud fixed her blank eyes on his nervous display. Something untoward had evidently passed between the doctor and their hostess, but she could not guess the nature of the transaction, nor was she much interested, in fact. When the doctor rose to go, she craved the favor of his escort on her own way.

He attempted no pleasantries, on the stairs or on the street, and Madame Arnaud appreciated that, though his bald head had flushed under its tan, and she saw he was uncomfortable in her company. She knew he was a little afraid of her, though she was beyond taking any satisfaction from that state of things.

“You must take me to Père Bonne-chance,” she said.

“
Comment?
”

“You must take me to Père Bonne-chance,” said Madame Arnaud, in the same flat and grating tone. The doctor’s hand flapped madly at a black fly that was buzzing near his eyeball.

“The priest who is supposed to have committed those crimes in the camps of Grande Rivière,” she reminded him.

“He never did them,” the doctor said automatically.

“So says my husband also. Not that it matters…not to me.”

“Why yes,
monsieur
your husband visits there. He might well introduce you.”

“I prefer it should be you.”

Doctor Hébert glanced across at her as they walked. She had not looked at him once so far, but faced resolutely forward, so that he saw her profile. She was much changed since their first meeting. Her color had improved, on the whole—she had more of a look of health than previously. The doctor had had some opportunity of observing her and it was his impression that she no longer drank spirits, or even wine. She had lost her alcoholic palsy, but her eyes were sunken and dark around the sockets as though she were exhausted by some long travail.

“Tell me why it is that you would go?” he said.

“I wish him to hear my confession.”

The doctor stopped in the middle of the street and stared at her. “But surely,
madame
, there are other priests. At Les Ursulines, for instance…”

“This one.
C’est lui qui je veux
.” She put her maimed hand on his arm. He glanced down at the gloved finger on his sleeve, the one which was folded under, resisting his first impulse to jerk away.

“Of course,” he said, “I could refuse you nothing.” The fingers on his arm were bird-bone light. “I will oblige you. Tomorrow if you wish.”

S
HE MOVED INTO THE PRIEST’S ROOM
in a cloud of muslin, footless, drifting like a wisp of fog. It was evening, and the sunset stripe was measuring out its minutes over the stones of the wall beyond the table. She sat down on the stool without awaiting invitation. He saw that she had been pretty once, to say the least, but her face was eroded by some torment. There was the strange, disanimated way she moved, as though she ran on wires or clockwork instead of possessing an inner life. Momentarily, Père Bonne-chance felt puzzled as to what might be her derangement. As for Claudine, she smelled the rum that he had just been drinking with the doctor, and was a little nauseated by the lingering fumes. She covered her mouth with her gloved hand.

The priest looked at her curiously, a ghost of a smile on his broad cheeks. His skin was rather oily. Claudine arranged her hands at the table’s edge. There was an unlit candle, two rum-smelling cups, and an end of bread sticky with honey.

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned,” she said.

But nothing more. The priest was waiting. “Tell me your trouble,” he finally said. At his back, he felt the failing light.

“This awful country,” she said finally. “This dreadful place.”

“Some find it beautiful,” said the priest. “I among them. God intended it to inspire awe, if that is what you mean.”

“God never meant for us to come here.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” The priest leaned back, considering. “They say the Indians who lived here were a gentle race—before the Spanish came.”

“I would that I had never come here,” she said. “It is evil.”

“It’s ourselves,” the priest said.

Claudine was taking off her gloves. “I knew you’d understand me. Only you.”

“Ah well,” the priest said. “So far you’ve told me little.” He waited. Certainly her hands were very pretty, pleasantly shaped, the fingers long, graceful and expressive. The stump on her left hand was a rough shock. Of course, he’d heard the story many times; it was inescapable.

“This is a place which debases men,” she said. “It makes them brutal. My husband has a love of torturing his slaves. He also fornicated with them. They bore his children. All of this happened many times.”

She stopped. The priest shifted his legs under his cassock, watching the red seam of cicatrix that sealed the stump of her left ring finger. “Was it your husband’s sin you came to confess, or your own?”

She didn’t answer him at once. The light had shifted so her face was in shadow, and he could not well make out her expression. While they were silent, the hummingbird appeared outside the window, hovering, then darted in. It hung apparently motionless in the space above the table. From a distance it seemed black, but as it lowered one began to see the iridescent green of the feathers that lay on its neck and breast like scales.

The priest rubbed a finger on the tacky surface of the bread, smeared it in the center of his opposite palm and raised it. Within the curve of his blunt fingers the hummingbird was suspended, long beak needling the skin of his palm.

“It’s a miracle,” Claudine breathed.

The priest laughed. “Oh, I don’t think so.” He dropped his hand and the bird snapped out the window, instantaneously as a shot.

“It’s only a bit of sugar,” the priest said.

“Yes…” She was looking at the wall, where shadows of the vine leaves flickered between shadows of the window bars. “Once I detested my husband’s cruelty,” she said. “The place worked its change on me as well. There was a maid he’d bought me, as a ‘gift,’ he called it. I knew that he had taken her to his bed—I never told myself but
oh
, I knew…I used her cruelly as I was able—as my imagination would allow. He got her with child, of course, and then one day when she was near her time and he was absent from the place, I had her bound up in a shed…”

She stopped, still staring at the wall. The priest’s back pained him. He leaned forward on the stool and propped his elbows on the table.

“Oh, the power I had over her,” Claudine said. “It was absolute. How could I make you understand it? No one can know.”

The priest lowered his face into his hands. Suddenly he felt very tired, and rather drunk as well. His forehead was humid with a rummy sweat.

“And so you murdered her,” he said.

“And worse.” Making its way around the table, the sunlight smashed her full in the face. It looked as if it might have blinded her. Perhaps it had.

“I cut the child from her womb alive,” she said. “I cut it out and left it there. To die. No one would go near. Not me. Not anyone. But still it lives. It comes to me. I cannot bear it. I cannot nurture it. I am barren, you see. I will never have a child.”

“I believe I understand you,” said the priest.

“And then…” said Claudine. “Of course you know what happened next. It was I who caused the insurrection. I delivered it to this world on my blade’s edge. Do you see? Because I
could not bear it!
”

“Yes,” the priest said. He rubbed the sore red rims of his eyes. “Yes, my child, I see your difficulty. You must sacrifice your pride.”

“My
pride?
” Claudine seemed to look upon a lunatic. The priest smiled back at her pleasantly enough.

“Do you know why pride is the deadliest sin? Because it enables us to root out all the others.” He chuckled a little, under his breath. “I myself am not so terribly afflicted with it. Others I have in generous supply. Gluttony, lust and sloth…At least those three, and in sufficient quantity to earn me a warm place in hell. But now, you see, I will be spared this. The Lord has laid my table before me. He will catch me at the brink.

“So I must tell you, offer up your pride, my daughter, stop thinking of the greatness of your crime. One sin is not so much greater than another in God’s eye. Be humble and be kind to others, as you have opportunity, and especially be kind to children, as Christ suffered them. When you do so, your heart will be softened, and you may yet awaken to the language of love.” He laid his hands palm up on the table. “Pray for me also (I will not have much time to pray for you). Have faith that the Lord will provide for you, even as He has provided for me.”

Her face was stricken in the blast of sunset. The priest hardly knew if she heard him or not, but he was exhausted himself by all he’d had to utter. Without knowing he’d do it, he yawned in her face.

“Forgive me, I am very weary,” he said. “
Ego te absolvo
. Go in peace.”

But Madame Arnaud remained rooted in her chair, gazing through and through him with her unseeing eyes.

“What was her name?” the priest said. “The maid, I mean to say.”

Madame Arnaud seized him by the ribs and clung. She drew herself partway across the table. No sound escaped her, but she was weeping now, as though she’d fill his open palms. With the strange light still full in her face, it looked as if she was weeping tears of blood.

N
EXT DAY WHEN HE RETURNED
to the Cigny house, the doctor found no one in the parlor—no one about at all in the lower floors save a brown-skinned maid and the footman who’d admitted him. Between these two there seemed to be a strange charged atmosphere. He waited dutifully for his presence to be officially recognized, thinking that Madame Cigny would certainly appear in time. When he first heard the shout from above he went racing up the stairs in triplets and burst into Nanon’s room without a knock.

She lay on her back with her knees drawn up, one hand tearing weakly at the hem of her pillowcase; the pillow seemed to discommode her, and Madame Cigny pulled it away. Nanon’s head dropped back on the flat, sheeted mattress. Her eyes closed, then were shocked open by a long writhing spasm that seemed to the doctor to begin at the base of her spine and shudder all through her till it sent her head lashing back and forth against the linen.

As the contraction passed, he walked to the head of the bed and took her hand. Her face was glossy with a sheen of sweat, and her eyes looked glazedly past him, into the queer angles of the ceiling under the eaves. Then she went rigid from head to toe, and twisted snakily against the mattress, a groan pressing out of her clenched jaws. She crushed down on his hand as if she’d break it, then relaxed with a fainter gasp.

Across the bed from him, Madame Cigny moved with quick concentration, arranging strips of cotton at the bedside. The brown-skinned maid came in carrying a basin of water which Madame Cigny took from her and placed in a corner. She pulled down the sheet and drew up the hem of Nanon’s gown. Automatically Nanon pushed up her hips so that the fabric could roll under. She moaned and jerked and crushed the doctor’s hand. Madame Cigny glared across the heaving swell of her stomach, seeming to see him for the first time.

“You’d better go,” she told him, her tone neutral. “You’ll find there’s nothing you can do.”

“No, no, I must stay by,” the doctor said, unconfidently. He made an effort to look wise and imperturbable. In truth he had attended few scenes of birth and knew next to nothing at all about it. Madame Cigny flicked her fingers at him, but said nothing more.

A new spasm ran through Nanon, sharper and stronger than the others it must have been. She raised up on her elbows and began cursing the doctor in close detail, with a thorough attention to every part of his anatomy, alternating between good French and wild obscure Creole epithets that tried the doctor’s recent knowledge of
patois
. As she fell back exhausted, Isabelle Cigny smiled and twinkled at him across the bed.

“Well, stay then.
Comme vous voulez
. Allow her to relieve her feelings.”

Nanon lay with her wide lips slightly parted, so that her teeth and tongue’s tip showed; the whites of her eyes were also showing through a gap in her slack lids. Her breathing was loud and laborious but except for that it looked like death, and the doctor realized how frightened he was.

“How long…” he said, uncertainly.

“She’s tired already,” said Isabelle Cigny, who seemed not to have heard him quite exactly. “A first child…” She shook her head, then dipped a cotton rag in the water basin and began bathing Nanon’s temples, but Nanon had jerked up again with another spasm and was cursing the doctor as before. As she subsided this time she spoke in a loud biting tone.

“Go get Maman-Maigre…Ma’maig’…
go get Maman-Maig
’!”

Doctor Hébert looked wildly across the bed. Madame Cigny pursed her lips and nodded…Some moments later he was flying out the door, pounding his way toward the Place d’Armes through the midafternoon heat. By the time he found the right courtyard he was all in a lather. The huge old black woman was sitting in the shade of a lean-to by the wall, talking to another slave and playing with an old polished chicken bone, which made a fluting sound when she blew on it. Doctor Hébert exhorted her to come, to hurry, using his most fluent Creole. For a long time Maman-Maigre’s face was blank, and when finally she’d grasped the message, or shown herself willing to receive it, she prepared herself with torturous lethargy. She packed a basket with herb preparations, cold biscuit, a change of clothes. At last he saw her put into the basket a little tortoiseshell kitten before she closed the lid. He was dancing around her like an overwrought lapdog, as she marched grimly back toward the Cigny house. But what in God’s name could she need a kitten for?