Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? (11 page)

In actual fact the Africans could never forgive Celanire for marrying because she no longer had time to look after the Home and left Tanella in charge. For them, Tanella deserved to be stoned with a hail of rocks after murdering Mawourou and to rot without a grave on the land she had insulted. Her acquittal was scandalous. It was true Tanella did not have Celanire's iron hand, capable of bringing to heel a troop of rebels. Under her management the Home foundered. Guinea grass overran the lawn. The papilios died in the aviaries. The nurses no longer wore white uniforms. The students' success rate dropped to nil. Discipline became lax, as did hygiene. Epidemics returned at an alarming rate. One serious incident alerted the French authorities. An officer on leave from Upper Volta, Jean de Brezillac, stabbed a colleague, Melchior Marie-Marion. According to him, Melchior had stolen his “fiancée,” Akwasi, a nurse at the Home for Half-Castes, to whom he had given a gold ring. The latter denied everything. An inquiry was opened. But the inspector, housed at the Governor's Palace, fell under the spell of Celanire. Consequently, his report boiled down to a panegyric of the “lovely Creole,” Madame de Brabant, and matters remained that way right up to Celanire and Thomas's departure for Guadeloupe a few months later. This departure stunned blacks and whites alike. It was true Celanire never stopped talking about her childhood island to anyone she met. She liked to repeat that she kept the memory of it in her heart like a candle burning in front of the high altar, for a country, just like a mother, cannot be forgotten. She confided in close friends that she had a sacred duty to carry out: find her parents, especially her real mother. Yes, her birth had been darkened and marred by tragic events. That beloved little papa she spoke of so often was not her real father, even if their feelings for each other had been unparalleled. Despite all that, watching her bustling with activity in Bingerville, you wouldn't be alone in thinking that Africa had replaced her island home in her heart and she would have trouble leaving. And yet she left.

One morning in February, a host of porters swarmed into the palace gardens. The strongest loaded onto their backs Celanire's fourteen trunks. The others grabbed Thomas's trophies—elephant tusks, a stuffed lion he claimed to have shot during a hunt, and miles of boa constrictor skin. The nurses had come down from the Home and were comforting Tanella, who seemed on the point of giving up the ghost. Celanire bade her an emotional farewell before setting off for the Ebrié lagoon. However, once she was seated in the fishing canoe under a canopy of woven palm fronds, she seemed to forget those she was leaving behind. She perked up as if the life she had just led no longer mattered. Ludivine, watching her, was shocked by so much insensitivity. Her own heart was grief-stricken. To what unknown destiny were they taking her? She already regretted the end of an era. She knew that the older she got, the more nostalgic she would feel for her childhood and Bingerville, and in spite of herself she would portray the Home as a lost paradise. She would forget its charged atmosphere, loaded with mystery. She would forget the way the nurses took good care of their boarders during the day and then the way everything changed from six in the evening onward. The way the children were hurried up from the refectory to the dormitory. As soon as the last Hail Mary was recited, the nurses locked the doors and vanished. The glow of a large lamp was scarcely reassuring, for once it had drunk its oil it generally went out before midnight, which plunged the room into darkness and a host of eerie shadows. The tots who couldn't get to sleep thought they heard the hullabaloo of music, noisy conversation, and shouts of laughter.

In early August a new governor arrived in Bingerville, as well as an officer who took over the management of the Home. Without further ado, he removed Tanella and dismissed the nurses. He kept only the cooks, matronly Ebriés and sturdy mothers who would not appeal to anyone. He restored order to the curriculum. For the boys, arithmetic and grammar; for the girls, cutting and sewing. We have to admit, we shall never know what really went on at the Home for Half-Castes. This splendid edifice, which appears in the book on colonial architecture by Frédéric Grogruhé, keeps its secret closely guarded. Closed down for many years when it almost collapsed into ruin, it was later entirely restored and became the Orphanage of the Ivory Coast.

As for Tanella, her life dragged on in sadness and came to an even sadder end. As she was one of the few “women of letters” of her time—let us not forget, this was the term for those who could read and write in the white man's language—she was hired as a schoolmistress for the mission. This unusual status aroused the lust of Chief Bogui Yesso from the region of Abreby, who hastened to make her one of his wives. But he married her merely for the sake of adding a woman of letters to his harem. During the first year he paraded her around like an expensive piece of jewelry. Then he abandoned her in one of the huts of the women's compound and neglected her to such an extent that she turned to Catholicism and became deeply religious. Catholicism in fact had spread like wildfire along the Alladian shores. It was conversion upon conversion, christening upon christening. The catechists were too many to be counted. Churches sprang up like mushrooms. At first modest buildings made of bamboo, they were now built of prefabricated materials shipped from France. Tanella, christened Marie-Pierre, died giving birth to her third daughter, for she could only produce babies of the vagina variety. In fact, she had stopped living many years before that—once Celanire had left her.

The day before Tanella's death—when she was already in her death throes—a dog such as had never been seen before in Abreby, a black hound with gleaming jaws, as tall as a heifer, as muscular as a bull, appeared in the compound. It lay down in front of the dying woman's hut and uttered the most frightful yelps, groans, and whines. Africans have no particular liking for dogs, that's a fact, and this one received a hail of mortars and a volley of machetes. Yet nothing would make it budge. If it retreated a few feet, it was only to return to the attack a little later and reconquer lost ground. During the wake ceremony, the commotion it made almost outdid the wails of the professional mourners. It kept watch during the church ceremony. It followed the cortege to the cemetery and stretched out on the black-and-
white-tiled grave that Bogui Yesso, still enamored with prestige, had built for his family. It only vanished at nightfall as suddenly as it had arrived, and nobody ever saw it again.

The Alladian fetish priests concluded it must have been the messenger of a spirit—a spirit far away who was lamenting the death of Tanella.

The inhabitants of Bingerville have nothing good to say about Thomas de Brabant either. He is not credited with any accomplishment. What surprised everyone was that once he was married, he lost interest in everything, he who was so authoritarian, meddled in everything, laid down the law, pontificated and exasperated Africans and Europeans alike. He lost interest in the roads, the bridges, the wharfs, and the railroad. He let his wife wear the pants, as the rather vulgar saying goes. He only stopped by his office long enough to absentmindedly sign the papers his secretary presented to him. At the same time his appearance changed. The former dandy now dressed any old how. His skin grew flabby; he lost the thick black hair he had liked to oil and became potbellied. In short, from a dashing man of authority he turned into a fat stick-in-the-mud.

They discovered the key to this transformation when they found out he was imitating another Thomas, Thomas de Quincey, whose book
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Celanire had given him for his thirtieth birthday. Like him, he was drinking laudanum. Under the pretext of treating a toothache, he had vialsful shipped from Grand-Bassam.

Morning, noon, and night he gorged himself on this lovely, amaranthine tincture.

Hakim thought Guiana looked like the Ivory Coast. Same sweltering forests. Green and more green everywhere you looked. Rivers, now in slow motion, now suddenly raging torrents. Only the ocean was different, swamplike, without a line of breakers or rollers. Cayenne especially looked like Bingerville. The same smells of almond, mango, and palm trees. Here too seven months out of twelve the sky was like a wet rag oozing dirty water that overflowed the storm drains and soaked the streets. The houses of the administrators were identical. There were the same public buildings under their rusty roofs, the Governor's Palace housed in an authentic Jesuit monastery, the bank and the transatlantic shipping company. In short, the same colonial ugliness encrusted amid the splendor of the forest like lice in a magnificent head of hair. The only difference: the buzzards, which ambled across the Place des Palmistes in Cayenne and perched on every available branch, were bigger and smellier than the African vultures. At first he couldn't help comparing Cayenne to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, where he had stayed weeks, perhaps months, perhaps years (it was all so muddled in his head) at the transportation camp. In contrast, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni was a little jewel. The convicts had built such lovely little houses for the penitentiary administrators, they had christened it “Little Paris”! Men are such wonderful creatures! Even reduced to the scum of the earth, they continue to be artistic geniuses. They built magnificent edifices and designed and painted friezes, frescoes, and paneling. From the transportation camp Hakim should have been sent to the Ile Royale, one of the Iles du Salut. But the cells there were already overflowing. So they sent him to Cayenne, where he became, like so many others, a houseboy, a domestic. Houseboy to Monsieur Thénia, governor of the Banque de Guyane, who lived on the promontory at Saint-François. He did not know exactly when he began forgetting the charm of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni and started liking the wilder, rougher city of Cayenne. He knew the city inside out, from its mangrove swamps and grassy squares to its streets cluttered with handcarts and its magnificent clapboard facades. He wallowed in its few corners of sunlight, soaked up its trails of shadows, and got drunk on its stench. In short, he became attached to its atmosphere of gloom. The town only came to life at carnival time, but the gaiety didn't suit it. Its smiles looked more like grimaces. Its bursts of laughter rang out like moans.

A few months after arriving in town, he was referred to a certain Papa Doc for a nagging dysentery. Papa Doc was doing time for rape of a minor, and his ten-year sentence had been commuted to life. He had built a shack made out of planks and corrugated iron within the prohibited zone along the seashore, but the authorities had turned a blind eye, since his reputation was known from Saint-Jean-du-Maroni to Mana, and from Ira-coubo to Organabo and Sinnamary. He was the living proof that saints ended up in the penal colony. On Devil's Island he had treated the lepers. At Saint-Joseph he had cared for the insane. At Charvein he had saved the wardens and prisoners from epidemics of scurvy, yellow fever, and yellow jack. At the New Camp he had put the bedridden and the crippled back on their feet again and comforted the dying on their final journey. He cured every form of gut ache, even ankylostomiasis, which tears the intestines to shreds. And all that with remedies of his own invention. When he was on the Ile Royale they let him roam freely around the penitentiary, examining the plants with a makeshift magnifying glass, plucking and stuffing them into the bag he kept tied around his neck. He captured anacondas with his hands and made ointments out of their grease. Sometimes he could be seen braving the wrath of the ocean, defying the sharks, always lurking, attracted to the smell of meat from the slaughterhouse, and catching manta rays he would eviscerate on the spot. Then he would dry them, grind them, and pound them to make unguents, lotions, and poultices. At Cayenne he had not wanted to live like the former convicts who banded together out of common misery, pilfered by day, and slept in the marketplaces by night, where they quarreled, hurled insults at each other, and squabbled. He had continued to invent remedies and treat the “Creoles,” as the descendants of slaves were called, now free, yet worse off than they were during slavery, as was everyone else. Even the Indians and the Maroons, the Boshs, the Bonis, the Djukas, and the Saramakas came down from their villages to consult him. All of them put their trust in the power of his hands. He meted out his treatment free of charge or almost, in exchange for the joy of a little wild honey, a slice of grouper, an agouti, turtle eggs, or a gourd of cassava
kwak
. So from five in the morning the sick, dressed in identical rags, with skins of every hue, lined up in front of his door.

Where did he come from? From Guadeloupe. He must have once been light-skinned, high yellow or frankly mulatto. Now his skin wavered between brick red and muddy brown, with grayish fissures at the folds in his neck. He no longer had a hair on his head. Nor on his eyebrows. A kick from a screw had broken his nose and knocked out all his front teeth. Smallpox had pocked his face with purplish stains and indelible scars. Chiggers had eaten away his toes, making him limp. Nevertheless, there remained his deep brown eyes, mirroring his compassion. Nobody had heard the sound of his voice, as if the suffering and ignominy he saw around him every day had once and for all stifled his throat. He communicated with his patients through a language of signs and gestures, the same way he communicated with a hard-faced, wild-looking Galibi Indian woman who had stayed with him ever since he had cured her of a case of yaws. She cooked his meals with an expert hand and of an evening gave him pleasure, for there was still the hint of a generous and capable body under her rags.

As for Hakim, he tended the gardens at Monsieur Thénia's, which was no small matter. He was up before dawn, and it was only at day's end, around six in the evening, that he had time to sit down with Papa Doc, side by side, always in the same spot, on the pebbles on the shore, facing the ocean. Looking blindly out to sea, they drew on their pipes stuffed with excellent tobacco smuggled in from Oyapock. What lay on the other side of the dark line of the horizon? They could no longer picture it, no longer imagine the time when they had been free to come and go and roam wherever they pleased. When the breeze began to bite and make them shiver, they would make their way back toward the promontory of Saint-François, walking one in front of the other, breathing in the smell of brine. The hut had a single room and therefore only one hammock. So Hakim had hung his outside on the branches of a silk cotton tree. The Galibi Indian woman would be waiting for them on the doorstep, savoring her pipe as well. She had already lit the grease in the oil lamp and on the kitchen range was heating up the wretched meal she had prepared. All three would chew in unison, without a word between them, lost in their thoughts. Then the woman would clear the table, wash up, and put everything away before slipping into her hammock. The men went and sat outside in the darkness. They would down one, two, three, four glasses of rum and separate, teetering on drunkenness. Papa Doc would go and join the Galibi woman, and Hakim, somewhat disgusted, could hear them moan with pleasure.

“Even so! At their age and in their state!”

He himself believed his body had long vanished along with any desire. On nights when he was lucky, hardly had he closed his eyes than he would fall into an opaque, dreamless sleep. On other nights he would toss and turn like a man possessed until the early hours of the morning.

One evening, the moon was in its first quarter and an ylang-ylang tree was endeavoring to perfume the smells from the swamp and the mangrove. Papa Doc was sitting with Hakim among the roots of the silk cotton tree when a sound rose from his mouth. An eerie sound. Like an out-of-tune piano. A rusty clarinet. A muffled trombone. A punctured saxophone. Accompanied by a high-pitched shrill, the clack of a
rara
during Holy Week, and here and there, the tinkling of a bell. During all those years he had not spoken a word; it was only natural he had lost the knack!!

 

“I was twenty-three or twenty-four, a student at Pau, when Aurélie, a girl who was in love with me, gave me a book that was to transform my idea of medicine and change my life forever. It was a novel written by an Englishwoman, and
Frankenstein
was its name. It was the story of a scientist who got it into his head to create a human being and ended up fabricating a monster. He took an instant dislike to it, and this triggered a series of unfortunate events. This sad story taught me that medicine is more than just curing typhoid, amoebic dysentery, or lymphomas, and we have to look further and decipher the secrets of human nature.

“I'm here for a crime I did not commit. I've told the lawyers, judges, jury, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry, over and over again, I am innocent. As innocent as the newborn fresh from his mother's womb. But I'm not disgusted, I'm not embittered. Because there are at least two other crimes on my conscience that nobody suspects, except for the Almighty up in heaven. They're the ones that landed me up in this hell. One day my sins caught up with me and consumed me with a raging fire. It's the Good Lord's justice. That's why I bow down before Him, ask Him forgiveness, and accept His will.

“Like I've just told you, I'm no bush doctor, no leaf doctor. I did my medical studies at the university of Pau in France, the first Guadeloupean, a descendant of slaves, to set foot in a faculty of medicine for whites. You understand what I'm saying? I should be rolling in money with a doting wife and kids. And look where I am. I haven't got a penny to my name. I'm dressed in red stripes with a black number on my chest. My father was a Royer Belle-Eau, a family of white planters who refused to pass their name on to me. But since he worshipped my mother, a seamstress, he sent me to school and paid for my education. But still I hated his guts. I dreamed of eating them in a salad, of making black pudding out of his blood. My mother wept every time I talked insanely about him. Because, after all, he was only concerned for my welfare. At Pau, Aurélie loved me although I was half black. I could have married her. Had quadroons with her. Whitened the race. But I didn't want to. On the contrary, I wanted to blacken it. The race, I mean. Go back to Africa. Become a cannibal again. Climb back up my tree. That's why I married Ofusan, a Wayana.

“The Wayanas were runaway slaves who had fled the plantation and settled on the slopes of the Soufrière volcano. When the whites finally got round to abolishing slavery, the Wayanas stayed put. The only difference, twice a week they came down to the villages to sell their garden produce. Hidden under their
bakoua
hats, you couldn't tell the men from the women. Same blackness. Same shaved heads, same scarifications—everyone was scared of them. They didn't speak Creole, but an African language,
Kilonko
. It was rumored brother slept with sister, and even with the mother. A real pig swill. When they had finished selling their stuff, they piled their baskets onto their heads and went back up the mountain. One day, they came to fetch me. A Wayana girl had slipped on a rotten mango amid the market filth. Her head had hit a rock so violently she had fallen into a coma.

“I had returned home to Grande-Anse two years earlier and opened my practice on the square in front of the church. There was no lack of patients. The sick came from as far away as Grande-Terre to consult me. They couldn't get over seeing a mulatto, an islander like them, doing what I was doing. They begged me to go into politics, to run for a seat in the Conseil Général. I had other ambitions. I researched, I experimented. I had invented a cure for dengue fever. I had invented a way of replacing broken hips in older people with an artificial one. But Frankenstein remained my dream, and I too burned with desire to assemble the elements of life to produce my creature. In secret, I conducted experiments on rats, mice, and voles. That morning, I grabbed my bag and ran to the market. The Wayana girl was lying on the ground, her head dripping with blood. I had a great deal of trouble reviving her. She finally opened her eyes. I must confess I soon realized I didn't love Ofusan. For me, she was a way of getting my revenge. On my father. On my mother, who had lived her whole life in servitude and adoration of the whites. On all those light-skinned girls she presented me with to whiten her blood. On the mulatto clique in Grande-Anse, who aped the very same families who had lashed their parents. On our wretched society, whose only concern was the color of money. Whereas poor Ofusan worshipped me. She was a saint. But men like me have no time for saints. They're only interested in
bòbòs,
loose women who stink of sweat under their patchouli. For me, Ofusan learned to speak Creole and French, two languages the Wayanas despised. For me, she had herself baptized. She attended catechism classes. She took her first communion, and then on April 27 we were married before God and before mankind. Ever since our wedding night, making love to her had been a problem. Her purity repelled me. My member, always sprightly, had never, oh never, played tricks on me—you know full well up till this very day it has never let me down—it became as squishy as blotting paper soaked in water. In order to get the tiniest erection I had to imagine she was one of my whores lying in bed beside me.

“I should now give you a description of Grande-Anse. It lies on the windward side of the island, in the middle of the sugarcane basin. On one side, the green of the cane fields; on the other, the blue of the ocean. It used to be a fairly big agglomeration: a mess of cowpatlike huts piled into neighborhoods—Front-de-Mer, Bélisaire, Carénage, and Bas-
de-la-Source. What they called the town, Grande-
Anse itself, was the residential district. It was composed of the cathedral Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul, the balconied, mansarded houses belonging to a handful of dignitaries, the boys' school for Christian instruction run by the monks, the girls' day school run by the sisters of Saint-Joseph-de-Cluny, the Saint-Jean-
Bosco orphanage, city hall, the dispensary, and the police offices recently opened in a former rum purging station. All around it were the whorehouses. Whorehouses galore! There must have been at least a dozen. The black and mulatto women whom emancipation had liberated from the cane fields and the great houses, and who had nothing to fill their bellies with, flocked to them. As for the white Creole planters, they did the same and paid a fortune for what they had always taken free of charge. Behind every girl there was a black or mulatto pimp. On the side I was the physician to the most popular whorehouse in Grande-Anse, called the Ginger Moon. There's a long story to it! My mistress at the time was a certain Carmen, a
bòbò
from Santo Domingo, matured by experience the way I like them, whom I had cured of a case of furunculosis. One day she came to ask for help. She was fed up selling her body to one and all. She wanted a rest and to get others to work for her. So she had the idea of opening a whorehouse and asked me to lend her some money. I accepted on one condition. I would be in charge of hygiene. The place would be spotless. Disinfectant and bleach. Every three months I would give the girls a checkup so they wouldn't contaminate the customers with the chancre, clap, syphilis, and what have you. She said, You've got a deal, and we were on a roll. And what a roll! Sometimes the white Creoles would be lining up in the corridor. There were mulattoes too, whom I used to see take communion on Sundays
beside their wives. As for the blacks, it wasn't girls they fought over. Believe me, they had other things to think about at the time. One night, I had an urge to see Carmen. I shall never forget that night. It was in September. It was pouring down in bucketfuls, and the claps of thunder would have awakened the dead. Since d'Artagnan, my Arab stallion, was scared of lightning, I walked to the Ginger Moon, wading in water up to my stomach. Soaked to the skin, I was about to go up to see Carmen when a young girl came out of one of the rooms. I had never seen her before. She must have been fourteen or fifteen, in any case no older. No taller than a tuft of guinea grass. Certainly no bigger. Her skin was shiny black. Her hair, a stream of oil flowing down her back. Even so, despite her hair, she didn't look like a coolie. Rather a hodgepodge of Chinese and black mixed in with Carib blood. The way she swept past me without even a glance, I can't even begin to tell you the effect it had on me. I arrived quite out of breath and asked Carmen: