Wonder (2 page)

“Did you see her with that tureen?” sniffed the cook. “She looked like she was carrying a chamber pot.”

From the street came the shouts and laughter of the crowd heading
en masse
to the port where they were preparing to throw King Vaval into the water. Each year, Vaval represented the greatest peril to have struck the island of Martinique and its inhabitants over the previous twelve months, or the greatest that threatened to occur during the following year, be it corrupt politician, bloodthirsty murderer, epidemic of fever or flu. The effigy was flung into the sea after a noisy procession punctuated by rattles and tambourines, all to the great displeasure of Father Blanchot who, ever since his arrival, had been fiercely opposed to these festivities, so reminiscent of the excesses of pagan bacchanalia.

Finally the meal was ending and the chocolate cake, crowning the feast, was brought in. Sated, fired up by alcohol but even more by the images in the mirrors of their flushed faces above lace collars, the guests spoke loudly, proposing toasts and, forgetting the silverware that had just a while ago caused them such anxiety, they grabbed handfuls of bread and fruit from their baskets. Edgar the butler – who, Baptiste observed, was the only one not in costume, maybe because, assuming that his status placed him somewhere between masters and
servants, he had merely reversed one half of his person for another – gazed unruffled at the scene, while Madame de La Chevrotière busied herself cutting the cake, not without a certain dexterity.

“Here, my good man,” she murmured, offering the first slice to Jacques, her first valet for more than twenty years now, as she would have offered a banknote to a beggar on the street. He took it with an awkward gesture and the plate, dropping from Madame’s pudgy hands, shattered on the mahogany floor.

The comfortably seated guests now realized why their masters refused to get up or even to bend over whenever they happened to let fall an implement or their napkin. For their part, Monsieur and Madame had obviously no intention of getting down on hands and knees to pick up a mixture of sticky crumbs and sharp shards. As for Edgar, it would never have crossed his mind to lift a finger, each of his two halves transferring onto the other the responsibility to intervene; he became, if it were possible, even more stiff than before, approaching in fixedness the bronze Louis
XVIII
scornfully watching the table from a corner. The seated and the standing stared at each other in a silence where floated famines, suggestions of let-them-eat-cake, the threat of guillotines.

Baptiste pushed back his chair noisily and, saying “Madame” at once to both Madame de La Chevrotière,
motionless amid the broken china, and the chambermaid at whose feet the plate had smashed, began to clean it up with his bare hands, as if he were gathering oyster shells on the beach. The next day at dawn he left the house without asking for his wages but taking with him two silver candlesticks.

When he shut the door behind him, the streets were still covered with confetti, while empty bottles testified to the merrymaking of the night before; on the waves floated the remains of the sacrificed effigy, which that year had been made to look like an American businessman who had stripped several of the Saint-Pierre widows of their fortunes before disappearing mysteriously. It would not have occurred to anyone to have constructed a King Vaval that depicted the very mountain in whose shadow the festivities were taking place for the last time.

S
HORTLY AFTER THE END OF
C
ARNIVAL, WHEN
everyone had resumed his place and the streamers had lost the last of their colours in the gutters, Mount Pelée began to sputter, releasing some feeble clouds, grey or white, sometimes accompanied by brief tremors. No one on the island seemed disturbed by this, for people were accustomed to such benign events. Settled now in the village of Le Prêcheur where, calling himself Mathias, he’d become a coffee-picker, Baptiste had got in the habit of looking up several times a day at puffs of smoke that looked as if they’d escaped from the bowl of a giant pipe. It was only after three weeks of indistinct rumbling that, curious more than genuinely worried, he undertook to climb the mountain to see what was brewing in the mist around the peak.

When he was a child, he used to observe the peaceful contentment of families who went to the mountain for their Sunday stroll. He had often played with boys his age, climbing the slopes of Pelée all the way to Lac des
Palmistes, a round basin that provided tepid water to cool down in after the ascent. A metal cross stuck into the rim of the pool was reflected on the blue surface, casting a protective shadow that their splashing would briefly trouble. Other children canoed there or floated wooden boats that Baptiste looked at speechless, not even thinking about envying them. The sight of these family gatherings filled him with something like sorrow, and he soon discovered that he preferred the Étang Sec, a shrivelled crater several hundred metres below that had no water at any time and for that reason did not attract picnickers. He would stretch out on his back in the middle of the lunar circle, close his eyes, and it would seem to him that he was the last human on earth – or the first.

On the mountain’s flanks, amid the jungle of palms, banana trees, and flowers, some of them with large petals swinging high above his head, the rock was pierced with vents from which escaped now and then putrid fumes that smelled of eggs left out in the sun. Those stinking holes were lined with the prettiest lace: festoons of red or ochre, concretions similar to those that grow secretly in the silence of grottoes, drop by drop, but here, in the sun of Martinique, they appeared overnight; purple or scarlet interlacing recalling the forests of coral hidden away in the depths of the sea, the crenellation so delicate it looked as if it would crumble at the slightest breath but that
when touched proved to be as hard as rock; guipure lace of dazzling gold as bright as the scales of the plentiful yellowtail snapper that fisherman roasted over charcoal on the beach.

One day Baptiste had wanted to take one of the mineral flowers out of the rock from which it had blossomed. Reaching out delicately to grasp a petal between thumb and forefinger as if it were a butterfly he was afraid of frightening, he had discovered that the stone was blazing hot and hastily pulled away his hand. For a number of days he had on the pad of his thumb a nasty blister oozing a liquid as clear as water; eventually it was replaced by a pale scar with an irregular outline that recalled in miniature the stone rose he’d wanted to take away, its image now graven into his flesh like a punishment, a reward, or an omen.

In this month of March 1902, Mount Pelée was deserted and, as he was climbing, Baptiste felt the earth tremble under his feet, run through with long shivers. Arriving at the Cross he discovered, stupefied, that from the Étang Sec were rising not the wisps of vapour he was used to but abundant sulphur clouds that rose directly into the air, like jets of water bursting from the blowholes of whales. The acrid, burning mist stung his eyes, forcing him nearly to grope his way along. The phenomenon seemed to him spectacular enough to warrant his tracing onto the bare cliff in large indistinct letters the following
words, using a piece of quartz that left an uneven line on the stone:

Today, March 23, the Étang Sec crater is erupting
.

He reread slowly the white message on the grey surface and realized that he’d neglected to write the year. He wanted to add that piece of information, but stopped as if prompted by a kind of superstition. In truth, he would have felt he was writing his own epitaph.

When he left the village of Le Prêcheur to settle in Saint-Pierre a month later, he had grown a sparse beard and developed new calluses on his hands, not from the sharp edges of shells but from the varnished leaves of coffee trees; his hair and clothes had the woody aroma of the roasting greenish beans that would be infused to obtain a brew the pickers drank morning and night, scalding and thick as molasses. He also had banknotes in his pockets.

The night he came back to town, he went to the Blessé-Bobo tavern in the port and saw Gontran de La Chevrotière, who didn’t recognize him. Leaning on the bar with associates dressed like himself in velvet and lace-trimmed shirts, everyone fairly tipsy and thrilled to be slumming like this, the popinjay was busy greeting each of his own rejoinders with a roar of laughter.

The room was crammed: sailors back on terra firma after long months at sea; clerks, vendors, and labourers from the area, here to spend their day’s earnings on cool beer and spicy rum; a few tourists, white, black, brown, and beige men with courtesans’ gowns forming bright spots amid the noisy and multicoloured mosaic. One of the girls, a mulatto with very brown skin and delicate features, was sitting at the bar, straight-backed, smile plastered on her lips, eyes alert, her slender waist hugged in a red dress with a flared, ruffled skirt like the corolla of a hibiscus blossom that begins to crumple as soon as it opens.

Gontran approached her, walking in what he hoped was a comical way, but hesitant because he was intoxicated; to the great amusement of his companions, he plunged his hand into the bodice of the young woman. She shook him off with one brisk movement but he grabbed her by the waist and, to hurrahs, planted a resounding kiss on her mouth. After Baptiste saw Gontran’s fingers climb again up the flounces on the bright red skirt, he got up reflexively, felt in his belt for the knife he’d been using since childhood to open oysters, slice mangoes, and cut off the heads of fish, then noted the surprise painted on Gontran’s face as the youth brought his hand to his side, where a red stain was spreading. Baptiste met the girl’s gaze, at once incredulous and grateful; she had dropped her smile as if getting rid of a mask.

A circle formed rapidly around Gontran de La Chevrotière, stretched out on the ground, shrieking like a stuck pig, while Baptiste went calmly back to his seat, where he had time to finish his molasses beer before the gendarmes arrived to handcuff him.

He was assigned to a bright cell furnished with an iron bed where he spent idle days, sitting or lying down, following the activities of the police force, inhaling the smells from the port, and, most of all, through a window striped with broadly spaced bars, gazing out at the sea. Having discovered that the metal rods were set in a cement made of sand and crushed shells that the salt air turned to dust if it was rubbed even a little energetically, he quickly dislodged three bars, which allowed him to go out once night had fallen. He paced the streets, had a drink, looked at the girls, and came back before dawn, in time for the first inspection by the new guard starting his shift. At that time he was served a jug of cloudy water, a hunk of bread, and a thin soup with a few shrivelled scraps of vegetables, which he stretched out all day, knowing he’d get nothing else to eat. He would be careful to take sustenance during the night, but the alcohol he poured down his throat, which left a burning sensation in his gullet, gave him a cruel thirst, and more than once, without a thought of shame, he begged an indifferent guard to bring him
something to drink – a request that was always ignored. At sunset, as soon as he had left his cell he rushed to the water tank next to the police station, plunged in the wooden spoon attached with a cord and took long swigs of sun-warmed water in which floated the smell of wood and sometimes a few whitish nits he later imagined with a shiver of disgust writhing in his stomach.

Why escape like that every night? Unquestionably because of his longing for freedom, a need to prove to himself that he was not exactly a prisoner, that although he was behind bars every morning it was partly because he had chosen confinement or at least was not its helpless victim. In that case why choose to come back and slip inside these four walls? Why not instead embark on a ship bound for Dominica or Saint Lucia, or simply walk to the village of Le Prêcheur? If he returned to his cell every morning it was not because he’d heard that Gontran de La Chevrotière had been operated on twice and hadn’t yet started walking, nor because the girl hadn’t come to see him, she who could have testified in his favour during the trial for which the date had not yet been set. Simply, when the dawn rose after his first nocturnal escape, when the sun was glowing red above the port, staining the sky with the pinks and purples seen in the cavities of shells, it had occurred to him that he had nowhere else to go.

“I’
M CONFUSED,
”
SAID THE SENIOR
M
ONSIEUR
de La Chevrotière, who then took a swig of Armagnac for comfort.

Sitting in a well-padded armchair in the stylish office of his friend and colleague La Tour-Major, he looked at the four men gathered around him, none of whom seemed to share his agitation. His mind at ease about the health of his son Gontran, who was still hospitalized but, he’d been assured, out of danger and would soon recover all his faculties – whatever that meant – he now had time to devote to more pressing matters, notably the election of his friend Charles-Zéphyrin de La Tour-Major to the position of deputy. Just then a muffled growling could be heard from outside and his fingers clenched the brocade armrest.