Hottentot Venus (33 page)

As the light rose over the King’s Botanical Gardens and the first streaks of gold pierced the darkness like the first day, its occupants began to fill the silence with sound. But there were no caged birds to be heard. The silent aviary was deserted. Today, the newspapers would write about the Hottentot Venus’s three days at the Jardin des Plantes and of the mysterious disappearance of hundreds of birds. And my master would be happy because receipts would rise with the publicity and the cashbox would once again be full. My contract had only a year to go. Then I could return home and begin again. I began to hope. I was young. I had years and years to live, I thought.

Alice and I walked down the long, wide avenue lined with chestnut trees that led to the bank of the Seine and the waiting carriage. It took the Pont de Sully bridge back across the river to the Tuileries, the Louvre and number 7 Cour des Fontaines and all who lived there—that rout of prostitutes, gamblers, circus freaks and beggars who shared our anthill of wretchedness. We returned to la Belle Limonadière, the dancing bear Adolph, the dwarf William, the alligator-boy Emmett, the giant Prince Ludwig and Joseph/Josephine the hermaphrodite. All still asleep under their ragged wings. I had believed myself to be free. But some claimed I wasn’t even worth my own existence.

I discovered a dark side of Alice one night when a drunken ship captain invaded the ghetto of our family of freaks at the Thousand Columns. I couldn’t take my eyes off the fair-bearded American, who looked so much like Hendrick Caesar I wasn’t sure it wasn’t he.

—What’re you looking at, nigger?

—Me?

—Yes, you bitch.

—Nothing, Master, I said, turning away towards William the Cock.

—Well, keep ya’ eyes to ya’self, gal. Don’t like no Negroes giving me the evil eye . . . What you doin’ in here anyway? Hey, he shouted. This place for Negroes too? I buy and sell niggers where I come from—Nobody drink with niggers in Gates, North Carolina. We string ’em up. Suddenly, he rose and walked over to where I sat with Alice, William, General Tripe, and Joseph/Josephine. The American stood glowering down at me as I cowered, not daring to meet his eye.

—What all you freaks need is a good buggering—for all you pains-in-the-ass . . . Whores, niggers, sodomites . . .

He pulled me up by my hair. The little people scattered, only Alice stood her ground, silently, like a lioness.

—Oh, you her girlfriend?

—I’m her servant.

—Her servant! Since when niggers got servants? Her lover, more like it, you fucking lesbian bitch.

—I ’ouldn’t press m’ luck if I were you.

—First, bitch, I’ll take care of Venus here, and then I’ll take care of you . . . Nothing I like better than to teach a lesbian slut a lesson ’bout who’s boss!

As quick as lightning, Alice was upon him, her elbow struck him in the throat, knocking the wind out of him as she twirled on the balls of her feet and caught his wrist as her left knee smashed into his testicles. With a vicious butt to his forehead, she smashed his head down on the oak table, twisting his arm painfully behind him, bringing the entire weight of her body upon him as if they were making love, pinning his head and chest to the table. As quick as a magician, she pulled a weaver’s shearing knife from under her skirts and pressed the point just below the man’s ear. In the blink of an eye, Alice swiped it across his neck, just under his chin, drawing a thin trail of blood. The man, seeing his own blood on the table, screamed.

—You touch her again and this knife will cut your balls off and I will serve them to you for dinner, you bastard . . .

The American struggled, feeling the droplets of blood trickling down his neck. By now the whole tavern, not understanding the English spoken, had fallen silent, fascinated by the more than understandable body language.

—You, you let me go, you damned lesbian bitch! You cunt sucker— woman fucker! Freak!!

—I neither love women nor hate men, said Alice, I simply detest strangers.

She released the man, who lurched away, cursing, only to be dragged away by two of La Belle’s bodyguards to the exit as excited French broke out amongst the onlookers.

It was true Alice didn’t like strangers. She had been raped by a vagabond on the road to her factory as a young girl. It was also true that Alice couldn’t stand to be touched except by Victor and me. I never asked Alice about her former life, although from time to time we exchanged stories about the past. I didn’t know if my governess dreamed of a man, a love, a family of her own . . .

—You and Victor are my family now, she would say, now that Ma and Pa are dead.

After those days at the King’s Jardin des Plantes, we often slept in the same bed as sisters would, or babes. The nights when Alice did crawl into my bed and curled up beside me were the only nights I didn’t dream of the massacres. Alice understood the whores and the prostitutes and they in turn loved and respected her just as all the freaks did. Although Master Réaux might beat her occasionally, Alice held her own and even he never dared to go too far. After that night, I often wondered if Alice had ever murdered anyone, since she carried such a weapon on her person. A weaver’s knife was deadly. It was hooked and razor sharp on both sides, its steel could cut the warp of velvet clean with one swipe. There was always an air of quiet violence about her that was ten times more frightening than the French bluster of Master Réaux or the vulgar harangue of the American. Alice, I was sure, was capable of killing in cold blood. Someone had showed her how.

Three months after his late-night visit with the baron, Napoleon Bonaparte ceased to exist. On June 18, 1815, he lost everything on the battlefield of Waterloo. He had no clothes, no empire, no army. The Emperor was as naked as I. He abdicated and the victorious English sent him to the Cape of Storms, the windswept, storm-swept wilderness of St. Helena, so near home. He would share his island with the giant tortoises and the Hottentots. Perhaps, I thought, he might send a specimen to his friend the baron. The Emperor’s final reign had lasted exactly one hundred days.

Paris had thrown off the last traces of Bonaparte like a discarded glove. When I asked Alice why the English kept the Emperor alive on his desolate, windy and wretched island, she said it was because the English were determined not to make a martyr of him by killing him.

—He is more dangerous dead than alive, repeated Alice. The only result of all his wars, except for his murdered Grand Army, is that the French are now dressing like the English and the English like the French and every man in Paris is imitating Lord Brummell by dressing all in black . . .

—It is as if, said Alice, the Emperor, like a species of insect, had suddenly become extinct.

Ever since the Jardin des Plantes, Master Réaux had become more and more suspicious of Alice and more violent than I had ever seen him. He now locked me up at night, ordering Alice to keep all doors locked and windows sealed because of my fragile health. The punishment for disobeying him was being thrown onto the streets with a denunciation to the police for prostitution.

—The workhouse, the poorhouse, the crazy house or the whorehouse, Alice, just like Venus, he threatened. He would raise his hand to me. Sometimes it would simply hang there, quivering in midair, but sometimes it would descend, on a wall or a piece of furniture, or on Alice’s neck, nose or stomach. He never beat me because I had to appear unmarked in my cage the next day. So his wrath fell on Alice, who took the beatings for both of us. He had, in fact, knocked out two of her front teeth. That was the reason why Alice did not accompany me to the duke’s ball.

In the middle of August, Broad Green moon, another hundred days after the return of King Louis, I was commanded to appear at a ball given by the Duc de Berry for the restored aristocrats of the new reign of Louis XVIII, who had once again entered Paris, in the wake of the departed Emperor. He was back on his throne.

The duke had insisted that I come as he had seen me at number 188. And so, I donned my flesh-colored skin-fitting silk sheath, my kaross of fox fur, my beads, my leggings. I painted my face and braided my hair. And I drank a whole quart of dry gin, washed down with my daily draft of morphine.

The ball took place at the Berry Hotel in St.-Germain-en-Laye, where aristocrats, monarchists and former Bonapartists all mingled together and raised their glasses to the King. Those left in the officer corps of the Grand Army, now restored to the Crown, were there, shimmering in new uniforms. Not all Bonapartists betrayed their leader. Many had gone into exile like Prince Bonaparte and the imperial family. Many of the English officers quartered in St.-Germain-en-Laye, their former enemies, were invited as well.

It was true that the guests at the ball looked different to me from a year ago. It was not fashion. It was because I now saw white people not as white people wished but as they really were. The hundreds of ex-Bonapartists, ex-revolutionaries and new Bourbonists swarmed through the gold and white rooms like a troop of baboons. There was something brusque in their movements, something dog-sick in their faces, as they chattered and chewed and moved from room to room like rodents scavenging in garbage. How was it, I wondered, that they had become the species and I the audience?

Under the blazing chandeliers, they sweated and exuded their feral smell, disguised by sweet-smelling, heavy perfume that up until now I had found so seductive. The lavish colors of the rooms, the feathers and plumes, the loud dresses (for white was no longer in fashion) contrasted with the men’s black penguinlike frock coats. The garish military uniforms in red, white, blue and gold dissolved into the shawls of cashmere and silk and reflected multicolored in the surrounding mirrors. The thump of dancing feet in the crowded ballroom echoed hollowly against
boiserie
and hardwood, making as much clatter as a rampaging troop of elephants. And like a troop of elephants, the occupants lifted their trunks and brayed, and that braying resounded in my ears and in my head, it seemed, all the way back to Table Mountain. Their laughter was an affront to me. Their joy made my skin crawl. My repugnance at their color, shape and smell assaulted me.

As the musicians gathered to accompany my performance, I asked myself who these people were to decide who was human and who was not; who was normal and who was a freak; who deserved to live and who was not worthy of existence? Who were they to proclaim the People of the People fit only for extinction? Weren’t we, the People of the People, the humanity of humanity, the humans of humans, more than expendable?

Revolt engaged my heart. I was here to amuse a public who didn’t deserve the effort it took for me to remain upright, to keep my heart beating, to keep myself from shattering into a thousand pieces. The mirrors no longer held the terror they once did as my surrounded image repeated itself over and over and over. The mirrors simply told the truth; just as my world had been annihilated from the face of the globe, theirs was thus doomed.

There was an air of anticipation and gaiety in the room. The masters of the world were ready to listen, to smile, to laugh, to play, to baptize, to bless, to condone, to nullify. They were ready even to forgive me for my shape, for my color, for my small brain and my curious ways. They were ready to indulge me with charm and pennies, laughter and affection, condescension and hilarity and then
forget me!
Forget me, ignore me or even dispose of me. I could be killed because I deserved only oblivion. Their indifference to what I had done before tonight or what I would do after tonight, or whether I would even exist after tonight, withered my soul.

The Duke announced my arrival. Hundreds of eyes turned towards me, waiting. Hundreds of lips murmured puns and comments. Hundreds of heads were pitched to my next move. I held my breath. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the baron. Since the Jardin des Plantes he was everywhere I was. He stalked me like a police inspector stalking a murderer. Sometimes I spied him in the audience at number 188. Sometimes I recognized his carriage outside the Cour des Fontaines. He had begun to frequent the Pied de Porc and from time to time the Thousand Columns. Our eyes met, but instead of his smooth and composed voice, I heard the snarl of Robert Wedderburn’s plea:
Flee, unhappy Hottentot . . . flee. Hide
yourself in your forest. Wild animals that live there are less dangerous than the
monsters under the empire of which you will fall!

—Let’s hear the animal sing, opted a voice from the crowd.

—Yes, what are you waiting for, Hottentot? Sing!

I held out my hand, my hand, a simple human paw of bone and flesh, and brought it to my chest, pounding again and again.

—I am not an animal. My name is Sarah Baartman. I am a woman! I am not an animal. My name is Sarah Baartman. I am a woman!

I squeezed my eyes shut until they ached from the pressure. I tried to distinguish what was real and what I was dreaming. Which surfaces were solid and which were only reflections of themselves. After a moment, who knows how long, I jumped onto the banquet table laid with silver and crystal candelabras, flowers and all manner of edibles: cantaloupes, radishes, butter, anchovies, olives, tuna fish, shrimp bisque, veal consommé, salmon hollandaise, York ham, filet Richelieu, queen’s mouthfuls, pigeon salami with truffles, fillets of sole, ducklings, roasts of pork, pheasant, oysters, wild boar, cranberry rum and kirsch sorbet, fried figs, chestnuts and sixteen desserts, upon which I trod, like a heifer, with my bare feet.

—Je ne suis pas un animal,
I repeated in French.
Mon nom est Sarah
Baartman! Je suis une femme!

—My God! She talks!

—This is marvelous!

—She speaks French!

—I thought she was a Hottentot!

—This is quite a show!

—Better than the vaudeville play!

—Is this part of its act?

My heart broke. The audience believed I was acting. I climbed the pink marble pillar as if it was a tree and hung there, swinging, while people cheered from below. The room filled with clocks and turned into the King’s Court amphitheater. The baron, who had hidden himself behind a column, was horrified. But then he disappeared. I looked around for him, but he was nowhere in sight. He must be here, I thought, but he was not. Three lackeys arrived to pull me down, but first they would have to catch me. The crowd roared. The clocks moved. Time passed. I lost track of it as people began to panic and run and overturn their chairs. Someone screamed; a wild woman! Flying clocks were everywhere now, speeding past me. Even with my eyes shut, they were there. I was higher than I had ever been; I looked down on the upturned faces. How had I gotten here? I was beginning to enjoy looking at things this way; from a bird’s-eye view—the birds I had freed or stolen. I closed my eyes to make things come into focus. Now I could see not only my hand but also my left foot, my knee and right elbow, my head, my backside. The marble pillars, the gilt mirrors, the yellow silk draperies, the chandeliers from which I hung, all took wing like the birds in the aviary. If I could only get away, I thought, into my own private darkness, branded on the back of my eyelids, all would be well. From there, I could find my way back to Table Mountain, where I could search for the glowing rock crystal, which was like looking at the sun because it contained all colors: purple, scarlet, coral and violet. I opened my eyes to survey the multitudes below. Their shrill voices spiraled upwards to knot in my hair and my gaze was drawn into the orbit of my own befuddlement.