Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (29 page)

"I see," I tell him. "Then they all wish they'd never been born."

He makes a sound that's as much cough as laugh, and then he says, "Still."

"Yes. Still."

"Beautiful women were my tonic, my wine. They kept me young years beyond my time."

"But," I say, wagging a finger at him in mock-admonition, "one must take care not to become a drunkard." I don't say what I'm thinking, which is,
A beautiful woman may have kept me young centuries beyond my time.

Casanova coughs up another mirthful sound. "I could write a book."

And I, too.

I was born into a prosperous mercantile family in Paris in 1780.

I cannot account for my apparent immortality, which takes the form of the protection I enjoy from harm and my immunity to aging. I recall making no promises to God, no pact with the Devil. Perhaps the Devil approached me as I tossed in the pain-wracked delirium of yellow fever over two hundred years ago. Perhaps he offered me these terms: "You shall live on until you find life unbearable. When once you wish for death, then I shall claim my part of the bargain." I was deathly ill, I would have accepted poorer terms than those. Perhaps, however, it was Sophie's curse and the doing of the loas. Or perhaps the answer lies still ahead, to be revealed to me only after I have lived out my third or fourth century. Perhaps I am the Antichrist. Perhaps I am the harbinger of something as yet unimagined by all prophets, something even unimaginable by them. I do not know. I only can accept my condition, and what choice have I but to accept it?

In any case, in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, as the sole son at the tailing end of a long string of daughters, and being blessed with beauty of person, I commanded much favor with my parents. I'm afraid they spoiled me badly, then lived to regret it. My sisters did their unknowing part, too, in making the monster I was to become. Growing up surrounded by young women left me with no fear of the creatures and, indeed, supremely confident of my ability to outmaneuver even the unsympathetic ones.

It was, however, a servant girl in our household who, by initiating me into the delights of the boudoir, unleashed the monster. Thereafter I was rapacious and unstoppable. I possessed the formidable advantages of money and a masculine comeliness that smote feminine hearts, in as permissive an age as ever was. I didn't long confine my attentions to servants, or to professionals, either, with the result that before my twenty-first birthday I had earned the reputation of a young man of flagrant indiscretions. Moreover, I had taken definite steps on the way to becoming a drunkard and a gambler.

It was my own wretched conduct with women that saved me from a short and totally dissolute life in Paris: the loose morals of the time may have been an incentive to my instincts, but there were limits. By figuring prominently in an affair involving the daughter of one of my father's investors, I provoked an eruption of paternal outrage. My father had already resigned himself to my being hugely indifferent to all aspects of the family business (save the cash it produced). Now, though, I wasn't merely a drain on his pocketbook; I had become a menace to it. He couldn't go so far as to disown his only son and heir, but he declared that I needed setting straight on matters of personal responsibility, and that the military life would do for it. Although the army was in transition at the turn of the eighteenth century, it was still possible to obtain an officer's commission by either buying it outright or else calling in political favors. My father was rich and a noisy supporter of the Republic—
voilà!
I became a
sous
-lieutenant!

I was no more unqualified than any other wastrel to serve as a junior officer in the Republican army. Indeed, I excelled in one regard: I looked good in any clothes but was positively dazzling in regimental finery. Never mind that it was the finery of a lowly lieutenant of infantry in one of the less desirable regiments (my father always shopped for bargains). Once I had donned those white canvas pants and that red-trimmed blue jacket, I was a vision.

I was put in charge of a company of men and largely left to learn by trial and error how to command them. It could have been a catastrophe. My men were illiterate bumpkins, malingerers, and deserters flensed from better regiments, prisoners, captured English seamen, Germans, and other foreigners. Heaven knows what would have happened had I actually given them an order, but I quickly understood that it was the business of sergeants, not lieutenants, to keep this surly rabble in line. That left me free to get on with my own business, which consisted mainly of drinking, gambling, and whoring. If my father had really expected iron military discipline to save me from my innate wickedness, he must have been disappointed, for there was no dearth of young officers as callow and useless as myself, and I naturally gravitated to them.

I hadn't been in the army long enough to incur many new debts or catch the pox before my captain, Ledoux by name, summoned all junior officers to his headquarters and announced, "We are ordered to Le Havre."

The man standing next to me said, "Sir, are the British invading?"

The captain trained his eye on my brother lieutenant, and I would have sworn that I smelled singed hair. "We are going to the West Indies to fight niggers!" Ledoux's attitude confirmed to my satisfaction what I had heard from my messmates, that our captain regarded his posting to an inferior regiment as a personal affront engineered by enemies in high places. Perhaps he wasn't simply paranoid—he generated a blizzard of petitions for transfer that melted away to nothing—and now here was the final outrage: he was to travel halfway around the world to help put down a slave revolt.

To tell the truth, I was none too happy about it myself. It wasn't that I had the faintest notion of what awaited us in the West Indies. I would have to leave Paris and all its delights!

But leave I did, to find myself, in December of 1801, or Frimaire of the Year X, if I remember my French Republican calendar correctly, en route to the West Indies as a member of the largest expeditionary force that France had ever sent overseas—thirty thousand men, including thirteen generals and twenty-seven brigadier generals, embarked on eighty-six ships of the line and transports, with another twenty thousand men to follow. I was by no means the only green lieutenant present, but the majority of men and officers were veterans. Our Commander-in-Chief, Captain General LeClerc, and his divisional generals, Rochambeau, Boudet, and Hardy, had led their grenadiers to glory at Hohenlinden, Marengo, and Abukir. The campaign plan had been drawn up by First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The mission: recapture Saint-Domingue, which is now called Haiti.

Fifty thousand men may sound like an astounding number to bring to bear on a single island, but Saint-Domingue was the richest colony in the world. It occupied the western end of Hispaniola—Spain controlled the eastern end, called San Domingo—and the value of its exports, coffee and sugar, exceeded that of all the British West Indies, even that of the thirteen British American colonies that had broken away to become the United States.

Our armada sailed from Le Havre, Brest, and Toulon. Perhaps we should have interpreted an incident that occurred almost at the outset as a portent of what was to come. Admiral Joyeuse commanded the fleet, but the First Consul, typically, had plotted its course, and Bonaparte simply did not understand the sea. He chose as our assembly point the Bay of Biscay, whose tricky current promptly smashed two corvettes together, badly damaging one, sinking the other with all hands.

I was too sick to worry about omens. I spent several days on the high seas violently disgorging everything I had ever eaten in my life, clear back to my first solid food. I suppose I should have been grateful that my father hadn't decided to send me to sea, but I cursed him anyway, and the military in general, and rebellious darkies the world over.

If ever I made a bargain with the Devil, it was probably at this point of my life. You would think, of course, that I should remember doing so, but perhaps selective amnesia is part of such deals.

The time came, anyway, when I seemed to have nothing loose left inside me. I was on deck, clutching the rail and staring out across the ocean, and it occurred to me then that I was beginning to feel better, that, suddenly, I was bearing up better than many others. I entertained the notion that I should pass the rest of the voyage in relative comfort. One can become only so seasick before either flinging oneself over the rail or growing accustomed to the ship's constant rolling and pitching. Either way, one ceases to suffer.

But, of course, I had no idea of the suffering that lay ahead for most of us.

Never for a moment did we entertain any doubt that we should regain what was rightfully France's. We were the warrior race of Europe. The word
contempt
doesn't begin to convey our attitude toward the blacks; we believed that we need only shoot into the air, and they would run away. None of us in the army had ever been to the West Indies before or bothered to read much about them, but from the naval officers we were amused to learn that there were "more than a hundred races" in Saint-Domingue—Congos, Fulah, Ibo, Mandingos, Senegalese, and bastard subclasses called mulattoes, mestizos, quadroons, sacatras. The slaves had revolted in 1791, and what began as a mere uprising had grown into a triangular sort of war in which blacks fought whites and affranchis and, occasionally, whites and affranchis fought each other. The affranchis were freed mulattoes, descendants of slaves and Europeans. Many of them had slaves and property of their own, and certain prominent mulattoes sailed with the fleet. They weren't exactly trusted as allies, but the feeling was that their innate viciousness could be directed at the blacks, whom they hated far more than they hated whites.

Also sailing with the armada were two young men who had been attending the College de la Marche. The First Consul had thought that they would be useful to LeClerc, for they were the black son and mulatto stepson of the man regarded as the chief troublemaker, Pierre-Dominique Toussaint, who had come to be called Toussaint L'Ouverture, derided by the First Consul as "this gilded African." Toussaint, said to be a man of considerable charisma, intelligence, and military skill, had rid Saint-Domingue of French authority and declared himself governor. None of us, however, was impressed by his recent successes against the British, who had tried to seize the colony for themselves following the expulsion of the French. We ascribed the gilded African's successes to failings on the part of the British, whom we naturally denigrated because they were our homeland's traditional enemy. We were inclined to be amused by Toussaint's pretensions. After all, at the beginning of the rebellion, hadn't the slaves seized muskets and, not knowing how to operate them, employed them as clubs?

The fleet straggled all the way to the West Indies, with our transports constantly falling behind and warships constantly having to be detached to wait for them to catch up. Consequently, the armada arrived piecemeal and at as ill-chosen a final rallying point as the First Consul could have picked. The Bay of Samana, off the eastern tip of Hispaniola, is full of rocks, and the leeward wind is strong—always a bad combination.

Another omen, perhaps, but still I shared in the general confidence of the outcome.

I was fortunate enough to be assigned at the outset to garrison duty in the north of Saint-Domingue and so missed out on not only the fighting but also the atrocities committed by both sides. Garrison duty was not unpleasant. I quickly settled into my usual behavior—shrugging off reports that trickled in of rebel successes. After all, victory seemed within our grasp: Toussaint L'Overture was captured and deported to France, where he soon enough died in a dank prison cell, and without their "gilded African" to lead them, what could the rebels hope to accomplish? There was plenty of good food to eat, rum to drink, local women to seduce. I began to miss Paris less.

"The most beautiful women in the world," I tell Casanova, "live in the West Indies."

He gives me a dubious look.

"There," I say, "is the true melting pot of the world. Arawaks and Caribs were living there when Columbus showed up and mistook them for Indians. Slaves were imported from Africa to work the plantations, and after slavery was abolished, contract laborers from India—real Indians—immigrated. Chinese, too, and Lebanese and Syrians. And what you have there now is people of every possible coloration, from blue-eyed, fair-haired Scandinavians to the pitch-blackest folks on Earth."

Casanova growls under his breath. He is of a generation disinclined to approve of miscegenation. If he had the time left, he might learn better. There's always hope. I learned better—I, product of a world that was disinclined to regard non-whites as human at all.

 
PERHAPS SOPHIE really did put a curse on me. If so, it worked, albeit imperfectly.

She was the octaroon daughter of an affranchi, and my head was turned by her great beauty as she was allured by mine. God, she was lovely. Robust women were the ideal then; she was slim, other men thought she looked starved, said she needed a good feeding. Men today would swoon for her, if men swooned, or run at one another and butt heads, which is more like what they actually do. (Not really being one of them gives me the right to speak of modern men in the third person.) The first time I saw Sophie, I, too, thought her too boyish to be attractive, for, no less than other men, I accepted the standard of beauty prevalent at the time. The second time I saw her, however, I noted her suppleness, her cat-green eyes, her luminous skin, and almost forgot to breathe while looking at her.

I can exactly recall the texture of her, her scents, her tastes, her sounds, the warmth of her breath as she traced her lips over me, the feel of her body pressed against mine, the strength of her love-grip, and, always, the look in her eye and the poison in her voice when she cursed me. Well, I did betray her, and with a woman of the town at that, openly, flagrantly, in a way profoundly wounding to her self-esteem. I was still the callow
sous
-lieutenant, at once arrogant and ignorant.