Master of the Crossroads (11 page)

Severe Spanish women, sheathed in thick black dresses, regarded them impassively from the doorways as they went by. The town was small and thinly peopled. There were few slaves, few blacks at all in evidence. Some mestizos walked the street, and more of the hard-bitten herdsmen they’d seen on the plateau. The military garrison was light, no more than a handful of Spanish soldiers. Toussaint parlayed with them briefly, then rode to the house where his family was quartered.

By hearsay the doctor knew that Toussaint had a wife and three sons, but he had never met them. Sometime during the first insurrections of 1791, Toussaint had sent them to this place of safety, over the border and across the mountains from the fighting and the burning. The doctor was curious, but could see little through the arched doorway of the house. Toussaint dismounted and went in with Moyse and Dessalines. The doctor heard a child’s astonished cry, and thought he also heard the soft tones of a woman’s voice. Moyse and Dessalines came out and the door closed behind them. Dessalines detached five men to stand sentry around the house, then led the column to the edge of town.

They bivouacked on the savannah north of San Miguel, just below the crest of a gently rolling rise. The Spanish officer commanding the town issued them two beefs and a barrel of rum, then left them entirely to themselves. The butchers worked efficiently; soon meat was roasting over several fires. Foragers came in with bunches of brightly colored, wrinkly hot peppers and sheafs of lemon-scented leaves. The beef was fat from the rich grazing of the plateau. They’d made their journey so lightly provisioned that they’d eaten very little in two days, and now the doctor feasted with the others, greasing his chops with tallow. Afterward the meat he’d eaten in unaccustomed quantity lay a little heavily on his stomach. He rested on his elbows in the grass, nursing a clay ramekin of rum and listening to the men tell stories around the fire. Now and then one jumped up to illustrate some action of the narrative. Across the fire, Dessalines also watched the storytellers, his smile glossy with grease from the meat. The night was clear and warm enough so they needed no tents or any shelter; they slept in the open on the folded, sweet-smelling grass.

In the morning word came that the Marquis d’Hermonas had arrived with a somewhat larger Spanish force, intending to shower Toussaint with various honors on the part of the Spanish King, whom he now served. But first there must be morning mass. The church of San Miguel was too small to accommodate all the soldiers, but the doctor went in, among the black officers. Toussaint was seated near the altar rail, and beside him his wife, Suzanne, neatly dressed and modestly kerchiefed, her round, brown face respectfully lowered. There too were the sons, Placide, Isaac, and the youngest, Saint-Jean, who looked no more than four or five. Again the doctor felt the mild twinge of absence or regret, and let it pass. Toussaint’s sons were well scrubbed and neatly dressed for the church service.

They were singing the Te Deum. Afterward Toussaint confessed, copiously or at least for a long time, then knelt at the altar rail and chanted prayers of penitence in a loud and fervent whisper. The rasp of his devoted voice carried as far as the church door, where the doctor stood near the Marquis d’Hermonas and several of his subalterns. The marquis’s eyes were glistening as he regarded Toussaint, and his voice seemed to catch when he spoke: “If God Himself came down to earth, he could inhabit no purer soul than that of Toussaint Louverture.”

After communion the mass was completed and all came out blinking into noonday sunlight. Toussaint was presented with an ornamental sword, and informed of an advancement of his rank. He was also given another gift: a small closed carriage in an antique style, crusted with fresh layers of black paint and with Spanish arms in gilt upon the door. The present seemed somewhat impractical—the doctor could not imagine how the coach might be transported over the mountains to the French colony . . . where most roads were impassable for such a vehicle, in any case. But Toussaint beamed with pleasure at the coach. Suzanne got into it, smiling shyly and holding the seat with her hands while all three boys bounced to try the springs.

In the afternoon all the town turned out for a bullfight given in Toussaint’s honor. The doctor had heard of such excercises but never seen one himself. He divided his attention between the bullfight itself and the audience that had assembled. The young and unmarried women here made their first appearance—normally they must have remained shut up in their houses (only a few had appeared even at church). Against the yardage of stiff fabrics that encased them, their faces looked small and doll-like, but their little red mouths stretched wide to cry
Olé!
The Spanish men were equally enthusiastic, but most of Toussaint’s soldiers seemed bemused or indifferent—surely there were simpler ways to kill a beef.

The bull was one of those longhorns they’d seen on the savannah. Each time the horn points passed the matador, the doctor felt a short, brutal thrill, amplified by the shouts of the Spaniards surrounding him. At the same time he remembered the cow they’d seen speared yesterday by the maroons on the plateau.

Toussaint’s elbow brushed his ribs discreetly; the black general spoke from the side of his mouth.
“Votre avis?”

“A tragedy,” the doctor said, his attention on the field. The matador was using a smaller cape now, and had taken out a sword.

“A waste, rather,” Toussaint sniffed.

The doctor glanced at his crooked half-smile, then looked back toward the field. The matador leaned in over the bull’s horns, probing with his sword, but he missed the mark and was tossed in the air. For a moment he lay breathless on his back in the silty dust, but before the bull could turn and find him with its horns, he was up and scrambling for his hat and sword.

“The man offers himself to death for no purpose.” Toussaint spoke behind the hand which covered his smile. On the field, the matador faced the bull again, lowering the furled cape and sighting the sword over the bull’s head toward the spot between the humped shoulders.

“And the bull?” the doctor asked.

“The bull does not choose, because he is not free.” Toussaint removed his hand from his mouth, which was no longer smiling.

The doctor felt his interest in the spectacle suddenly collapse, though the Spaniards were again shouting all around him. Again he remembered how the maroons had killed their beef on the plateau, and he thought that perhaps their action was not only more useful but even more beautiful than what he was seeing now.

The days that followed began to drag. Toussaint was often in counsel with the Spanish officers, but the doctor was not invited to serve him as amanuensis on these occasions. No reason was given for his exclusion, but he did come to feel he’d been deliberately shut out. Apart from d’Hermonas himself, whose manner was open and frank with everyone, the Spaniards seemed to distrust him a little, perhaps only because he was French.

Most mornings the doctor visited Toussaint’s house for coffee, and one evening he was invited there to dine with several Spanish officers and one of Toussaint’s black captains, Charles Belair. It struck him again that the Spaniards were uneasy in his presence—possibly it was his imagination but they all seemed to be looking somewhere over his shoulder when they spoke. He fell silent, watching Suzanne, who sat fluidly erect in her place, or sometimes rose and went to supervise the preparation of the next course in the kitchen. She spoke a competent Spanish, the doctor noticed, or anyway it was better than his own. She had the thickness of age, without being heavy; she still seemed light and graceful when she moved. Her kerchief, bound to her brows neat and tightly as a knife’s edge, concealed her hair completely, so the doctor could not know if it were gray. Her face was round, pleasant, only a little wrinkled at the corners of the eyes and mouth. She kept her eyes lowered for the most part, and offered little to the conversation of the men.

As the doctor felt alienated from the men’s talk himself, he tried Suzanne with various conversational sallies, but her replies gave him little purchase to continue. Finally, at Toussaint’s signal, the older boys, Isaac and Placide, came forward to show him samples of their penmanship. The writing was neat, correct, and with a more orthodox spelling than their father commanded. Both boys were well spoken and their French was very proper. The doctor praised them for these qualities and saw their mother smile.

The afternoons were hot and dry and dusty. Sometimes small parties of Toussaint’s troop would ride out over the savannah to exercise their horses. It was less dusty there, at least, than in the town. The doctor would have liked to botanize, but as he spoke only a few words of Spanish he could find no one in San Miguel who was knowledgeable about the herbs of the plateau.

Meanwhile, the quality of their rations diminished noticeably, till they were eating nothing but the dried beef which was so plentifully produced here in the Spanish colony—but apparently to the exclusion of almost everything else. There was no corn or rice or beans to be had at all, only a little moldy flour and shriveled dried peas, both imported from Europe at absurdly high prices. Friction developed when it was noticed that d’Hermonas’s men, about equal in number to Toussaint’s, seemed to have fresh meat to eat. Doctor Hébert discussed the problem with Moyse and Dessalines, and finally agreed to go hunting on the plateau with them and a few others. They rode out several miles from the town to a waterhole where the doctor knocked over a couple of apparently wild cattle with his long rifle.

The others whistled at his markmanship, for the range had been quite considerable. While other men were butchering the meat and loading the pack burros they had brought, the doctor demonstrated the workings of the rifle to Moyse and Dessalines. The gun was something of a rarity here, having been imported from the North American Republic.

That night there was feasting and celebration, but the next day one of those dour and taciturn Spanish herdsmen came forward with a complaint about his lost animals. There ensued a very unpleasant hour during which it appeared that fighting might break out between the Spanish and black soldiers, for the latter were not at all inclined to suffer any punishment or reprimand from whites. In the end the affair was smoothed over for a promise of money, and everyone (the doctor especially) breathed easily again.

Three more days of heat, dust, tedium and dried beef. On the fourth morning, when the doctor visited Toussaint’s house for his usual coffee, he found that the former guard had been replaced by a somewhat larger number of Spaniards. No one was allowed to enter; Toussaint was, inexplicably, under house arrest. When the doctor protested and tried to ask an explanation, he was escorted to the end of the block at the point of a bayonet.

He went immediately to d’Hermonas’s quarters, where he learned that the marquis had been replaced in his post and indeed had already left the town, by all accounts somewhat unwillingly. In his stead appeared one Don Cabrera, who received Doctor Hébert calmly, no more than a little coolly. Cabrera could not say why Toussaint had been confined, nor why d’Hermonas had been ordered elsewhere. For such information it would be necessary to apply to Captain-General Don Joaquín García y Moreno, who had given the orders. The Spanish general’s whereabouts were not precisely known, though most probably he was now en route to San Miguel from Santo Domingo City.

“Can you doubt Toussaint’s fidelity to the Spanish throne and cause?” The doctor put the question bluntly, though conscious that his phrasing hardly committed him to a definite belief on that subject.

“Perhaps I have been less impressed with the fervency of his devotions than was the Marquis d’Hermonas,” Cabrera said. He smiled thinly and rearranged some papers on his table. Upside down, at the foot of a letter, the doctor thought he could make out the name of Biassou.

“There are some who contend,” Cabrera said, “that if Toussaint prays so long and loud, it is only the better to deceive those who observe him.”

The doctor opened his mouth, but nothing emerged. Cabrera looked at him expectantly.

“I have known this man since the first insurrection in the north of Saint Domingue,” the doctor said carefully. “I would put my life in his hands with no hesitation. Indeed I can attest that he has already saved it more than once.”

Cabrera nodded, but said nothing. He reached for his pen and glanced at the door. The interview was at an end.

Doctor Hébert found the junior black officers arguing in their encampment at the edge of town. Dessalines was for sacking San Miguel immediately, or at least for forcing entry to the house so as to liberate Toussaint and his family from this unjustified detention. Moyse seemed half persuaded to this course, while Belair and Maurepas were counseling restraint.

“Doucement,”
the doctor said. “Let us go softly, gentlemen, and bide our time a little.”

Dessalines looked at him directly, which was rare; the doctor felt the pressure of his eyes like two palms shoving him smoothly backward. He forced himself to hold the gaze.

“In such a case, I ask myself,” the doctor said, “what would Toussaint himself do?”

“Nothing,” Dessalines said, snorting as he broke the stare. He shifted his weight and looked down at the blanket where he sat.

“Nothing,” the doctor repeated. His eyes ran round the faces of the others. He was not in the confidence of these men, and he felt an uncomfortable thrill at the nakedness of the idea between them.

“Watch,” Moyse said, “and wait.”

Thus it was agreed among the four black officers to await developments, and the arrival of Don García, at least for one more day. The doctor found himself returning toward the town center, in the company of Maurepas—a more comfortable companion, certainly, than Dessalines or even than Moyse. His own question whined in his ears:
What would
Toussaint himself do?
What did Toussaint mean to do? It struck him that since they’d left Ennery he had not been much in Toussaint’s confidence either.