Free Victoire by Maryse Condé Page A

child and that’s what we all want. Isn’t that right?”
    In this discussion I will try and excuse Victoire. Anne-Marie promised to come to her aid by procuring her a job as a cook. Not only was it a way of rescuing her, but also of ensuring a roof for her child. But Anne-Marie had no use for Victoire’s ragtag relations of field Negroes, country bookies, and boo-boos. She didn’t want them on her floor. Victoire, who was in no position to protest, had to accept her conditions. I have to admit too that Caldonia’s death, Dernier’s desertion, and all the vile deeds of Marie-Galante had hardened her heart. She had loved her grandmother so much that, deprived of her warmth, she withdrew into herself. As for the island that had treated her so badly, she returned the compliment.
    A ROUND 1892 L A Pointe, “the yellow city,” numbered a little under twenty thousand souls. Prosperous in spite of her incredible filth, she had been the prime victim of natural catastrophes. We mayrecall that after the February 1843 earthquake, rear admiral Gourbeyre, then governor of Guadeloupe, addressed the following dramatic message to his ministry in charge: “At the moment I am writing to you I have learned that La Pointe no longer exists.”
    He was mistaken; La Pointe was born again like a phoenix from its ashes. But it was still not out of the woods. In September 1865 a powerful hurricane devastated it once again. Six years later a fire destroyed it entirely. As a consequence Boniface Walberg, heir in 1889 to his uncle Ludovic, who had returned to France given the difficulties of the sugar industry, reinforced with masonry the house on the rue de Nassau, a little outside the center on the western outskirts of town. He even went so far as to cast a concrete slab on the roof, which had the annoying habit of flying off at the slightest blow of wind, and then cover it with slate tiles. His house was now a replica of his store, whose facade stretched twenty meters along the quai Lardenoy, adjacent to the businessmen’s club where they held the most magnificent of balls. The house on the rue Nassau had one particular feature: a secret garden at the back, hidden from prying eyes, like certain houses in London. Behind the kitchen and the washhouse there were almost a thousand meters of lawn where a large-leafed licuala and two blue palm trees grew. Anastasie, Uncle Ludovic’s wife, had planted some pomegranate trees with bright red flowers.
    We note that the name of Boniface Walberg was listed in the
General Business Almanac
, which included the names of the most important merchants. His employees, whom he treated with a rare correctness at a time of inequality, had invented the half-affectionate, half-mocking nickname of
Bèf pòtoriko
because he was short-legged, thickset, with a forehead hidden under a fringe of hair as black as the coat of a bull from Puerto Rico. They credited him also with a member that would not have been out of place on such a creature. If you believed the gossip, the
dames-gabrielle
from a bordello on the Morne à Cayes, which he frequented regularly before his affair with Victoire, avoided him, fearful of his iron rod. Underneath this appearance he was in fact someone unsure of himself, timorous, even fainthearted. He had let himself be hoodwinked into marrying Anne-Marie Dulieu-Beaufort, who had brought him as a dowry nothing more than a violin, not even a Stradivarius, a mundane instrument purchased for a few francs at an instrument maker’s in La Pointe. Authoritarian, and a head taller than he, she intimidated him to such a degree that he made love to her only on the fifth night of their marriage. It had been a fiasco. Ever since, he had been such a rare visitor to her bed that when in exasperation she announced she was pregnant, he was close to thinking it was another machination of the Holy Ghost.
    He started eating dinner alone, having learned that his wife had gone to Goyave without telling him, as