The Boiling Season (22 page)

Chapter Seventeen

T
hat night the rain caught me by surprise. I was sitting at my desk, staring past the open jalousies, when suddenly the sky opened up. In an instant it was as though I were staring into a waterfall. I got up to close the shutters, and just then the wind sent one of the stone pots crashing off the balustrade to the tiled floor of the balcony.

I secured the shutters of the manor house first. Then I rushed from villa to villa, but there was no way for me to get to all of them in time. Rain raced down the cobblestone paths as if along a riverbed, the stairs like so many rapids. By the time I reached Madame's villa, the rain still had not let up. Soaked and muddy, I sought shelter inside.

* * *

Madame had always claimed privacy as her reason for choosing to live in the villa. In truth, however, it was clear she would have found just as much privacy—and far more space—at the guesthouse. Even after the estate's expansion—the addition of forty-three more villas—Madame continued to stay, despite the loss of her private pool and garden. Nor did the newness and amenities of the other villas lure her away.

What I think drew Madame to this particular villa—what overshadowed its numerable disadvantages—was its history, which M. Guinee had told me only after I had begun to work here.

M. Guinee did not himself know who originally built Habitation Louvois. One can only assume that in the early days of the colonial settlement it was the home of a wealthy plantation owner. Given the distance of the estate from the cane fields, it is also possible the property served as a mountain retreat, rather than as a year-long residence. What M. Guinee did know for certain was that—more than a century and a half before—the estate had come into the hands of General Louvois, who arrived on the island as commander of a forty-thousand-man colonial army. General Louvois had been sent here to quell an uprising of slaves, the human chattel imported from a distant, savage continent for the purpose of harvesting the empire's sugar fortune. Their sudden rebellion threatened to destroy everything the general's countrymen had spent decades building.

Perhaps the general was expecting an easy engagement, for he brought along his young wife and newborn son, as if the trip were a day's outing to the countryside.

M. Guinee knew few of the facts concerning the general's life at the estate. What had been passed on to him were merely stories. It was the very gruesomeness of the stories that made them so hard to believe. Was it true that General Louvois once ordered a servant accused of having stolen a gourd of cornmeal to be buried alive in the doorway to the storeroom? The truth is difficult to know. During construction of the hotel, the old storeroom was torn down and a new one put up. The excavation produced no remains.

The war slogged on for more than twelve years, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. The general's army, despite its muskets and cannons, was decimated, worn down by disease and the fierce resistance of a people fighting for their freedom.

In the end, this small piece of the empire was lost, never to be regained. But it was not just the general and his countrymen who found themselves defeated. So too was the loss felt by the island's mixed-blood offspring, born from the unsanctioned unions of settler and slave. Despite their lower caste, they had by virtue of their lighter shade sided with those whose divine right it was to rule, whose ranks they would have done anything to join.

Shortly before General Louvois and the remnants of his forces fled—along with whatever white settlers they could fit on their warships—the general was said to have held a party in honor of the wives and sisters of the collaborating mulatto officers, a fête to show his gratitude, even in the face of defeat, for their efforts in undermining the black cause. The evening was full of fine food and dancing, and at the end of the night the women were invited out to the garden, where they were greeted with a sight none of them at first understood. Along the paths, lit by oil lamps, a group of figures cloaked in black robes were leading a procession of coffins. When the women were invited to come closer, they saw inside the coffins the freshly slaughtered remains of their husbands and brothers.

Thus it was said that if ever there had been uncertainty about the distinction the empire made between the various shades of black and brown, there could be no longer. No matter how diluted, the taint of color was absolute. Only to us did the differences between light and dark matter, and with time this preoccupation would only continue to grow, until finally its shadow hung over all our daily pursuits.

Were I to accept the story, I would never have been able to set foot in the manor house; I would have been unable to cross the threshold of the gate. But in following the fate of Senator Marcus, I had seen how easily truth could be manipulated, how a man could be made into something other than what he was. To the extent that it was within my power, I would not allow legends to trap us forever in the past. Of everyone who worked at the estate, only Madame and I knew of its origins, and we never spoke of them. Nor did we ever discuss intentionally keeping these stories from the rest of the staff. But I think we both realized we were saving them from something they would not have wanted to hear.

If any place on the estate was free of the bloody legacy of General Louvois, it was Mme Freeman's villa, which had originally been built for the general's wife. Unlike her husband, the career soldier, Mme Louvois was said to have been a spirited young woman, active in the arts. She had made the long journey here against her will, loathing politics and all things military and dreading the unremittingly sticky climate. Upon arriving she had immediately set out to distance herself from the entire undertaking.

It was said that Mme Louvois chose to have her villa built in that particular location both for the view it commanded of the bay above the tree line as well as for its distance from her husband and the comings and goings of his advisers and underlings. The general's wife was an artist—a painter, though she dabbled in music as well. The bay provided the inspiration for many of her landscapes, and the seclusion assured privacy for painting portraits. As subjects, she was said to have favored her husband's male slaves.

Whenever I try to imagine such a scene, I cannot help thinking it likely that the general was aware of what was happening in his wife's villa. Mme Louvois reputedly made no effort to hide her work. And one cannot help but wonder about those men as they sat for portraits in an airy poolside villa with the general's wife. What sense could they have made of it? They had to know her husband would mutilate them if he ever caught them together. Perhaps they feared she would have them killed if they refused. Then again, maybe an opportunity to sit for an afternoon in relative leisure was worth the risk.

When she moved in, more than a century and a half later, Mme Freeman took care to furnish the villa with restored pieces from the colonial period, including an armoire thought to have originally belonged to the general's wife. But the object of which Madame was most proud was an original painting signed by Mme Antoinette Louvois, which hung in the sitting room. It was perhaps the only painting by Mme Louvois to have remained on the island after she and her husband fled. In delicate strokes of oil carefully turned and daubed to capture every realistic detail, Mme Louvois had re-created the very view of the bay one could see outside even now, and more than once during Mme Freeman's absences I had carried the painting out to the terrace where Mme Louvois must have painted it all those years ago. To stand where the general's wife stood and to see what she saw was to have been present at the birth of the nation. Some of the trees were different—old ones having fallen and new ones having taken their place. But the bay had not changed, although it was true that naval frigates, such as the ones in the painting, were long gone. By now so too were the ocean liners that had been anchored there just a few weeks before. Soon there would be no ships at all, except the occasional lilting barge bearing peasants and charcoal from the north. Whether or not it was a good painting, I was unqualified to say; I had no basis for making such judgments. But if the purpose of art is to make us feel pleasure and pain, then it was a very great work indeed.

The night of the storm, while stranded in Madame's villa, I spent a long time sitting on the sofa looking at the painting, and I thought how peculiar a coincidence it was, finding myself here in Mme Louvois's former sanctuary on the very day our hotel came to its end. I wondered how Mme Louvois had felt when she learned her husband's army had faced its last defeat, and if, as her maids loaded her clothes and jewels and paintings into crates to be hauled to the hold of the ship that would return her to her proper home, she felt any regret or nostalgia for what she was leaving behind. I cannot help thinking she truly did come to love the island, and perhaps she even loved some of the men who had sat for her and let her capture their likenesses on canvas. Perhaps that was why she had taken those canvases with her, so that she would be able to remember the men when she was back again in her own country and the island itself became a long-forgotten dream.

I
awoke the next morning with the sun in my face. I opened my eyes to find a woman standing above me, the jalousies open behind her.

“I trust everyone is gone?” she said.

The light at her back made her seem to glow. I gave no thought to answering her, for it seemed impossible to me that what I was seeing was real. Was she Antoinette Louvois, come to paint me? The woman reached out and touched my wrist, which dangled from the edge of the sofa.

“I trust everyone is gone?” she said again.

“They are.”

She went out to the terrace and returned a moment later with her bags, and as she closed the shutters behind her, the light faded and I saw that it was Mme Freeman. Panic brought me to my feet, but I had only half risen when the pain in my head knocked me back down. From the bedroom, Madame called.

“Is there anything to eat?”

“I'll bring you something,” I said, and I had just enough sense to grab the empty bottle as I stumbled outside.

As one's mind does in such moments, mine immediately sought to repeat the events of the last few minutes. But no matter how much I wished to be able to recall every nuance of Madame's expression upon finding me on her sofa, I could not. I could only assume she had been furious. No doubt she had seen the bottle. And how could I explain about the storm of the night before, now that all trace of it had evaporated in the morning sun?

I was still so upset and distracted when I reached the kitchen that I actually called out to Georges, and I felt a moment's anger when he failed to respond.

I was surprised to note they had taken care to clean up before they left. The pots hung from the hooks in rows above the butcher knives and ladles, which were themselves arranged according to size. Had this, too, been M. Gadds's order?

There was no food. This should not have surprised me, for I knew we had received no deliveries in days. But I was in no mood for more setbacks.

On a table in the dining room I found the dishes Georges had brought me the day before, all of which I had left uneaten. Everything had spoiled.

I had to make do with what I could gather outside, assembling a breakfast of mango and papaya.

“I'm sorry,” I said when I returned to Madame, sitting at the table on her terrace. “We seem to have run out of pastries. And I don't know what happened to the last of the coffee.”

She regarded the tray with a flicker of displeasure.

“There's water in the pitcher,” I said apologetically.

Madame seemed neither angry nor pleased. “Why don't you sit down and have some of this?”

Although I wanted nothing more than to join her, I suspected she would be more likely to forget the morning if I were not here to remind her.

“I should get to work.”

Madame poured herself a glass of water. “There will be plenty of time for work.”

With her foot she pushed out the chair opposite hers at the table, and indeed, Madame seemed to believe what she said. We spent the rest of the afternoon on the terrace, looking out over the bay. Several times I went to fill the pitcher, but she would otherwise not allow me to leave her side, though neither did she seem to have anything in particular to say to me. Not once did she ask about my presence in her villa that morning. She gave every indication of having forgotten.

As the sun touched the treetops to the west, she turned to me and said, “What should we have for dinner?”

I recalled having seen one last chicken in the yard, and I told her about it, glad at last to have something to offer. “I'm afraid, however, that I'm not a very good cook.”

“And I'm not much of a butcher,” she said. “If you'll do that, I'll take care of the rest.”

So I did as she asked, and I plucked the bird, too. By necessity her preparation was simple. In the herb garden behind the kitchen she picked sprigs of thyme and tarragon. With the chicken roasting in the oven she went back to her villa to freshen up. For me it was an occasion to get out of the clothes I had been wearing since yesterday. By the time she returned, I had set a table in the dining room, with a bouquet of her favorite bee orchids arranged as a centerpiece.

“It's been years since I did anything like this,” Madame said as she opened the oven, “but I believe it's done.”

“I have no doubt it will be delicious.”

While I carved, she went to see what sort of wine we had left.

For a meal assembled so quickly and with so little, it came out remarkably well. What the chicken lacked in seasoning, it made up for in tenderness. I complimented her.

“Oh, I'm not helpless,” she said. “I know my way around a kitchen. I used to enjoy cooking quite a lot. But of course it's hard to find the time. And since my husband passed away, I've lost my motivation. It rarely seems worth it to go to such trouble for oneself.”