Free Victoire by Maryse Condé Page B

usual.
    “Goyave? What on earth is she doing in Goyave?”
    Flaminia, the servant, had no idea.
    Those who know their geography know that the river Salée is the name of the stretch of sea that separates Grande Terre and La Pointe from Basse-Terre and Goyave. A barge operated as a ferry to cross it. Anne-Marie and Victoire had to wait their turn for two full hours, stuck between numerous carriages.
    When they arrived at rue de Nassau it was already dark.
    Holding his spoon midair, Boniface looked at the strange trio that came into view. Anne-Marie, regal, wearing a low-cut dress revealing the cameo jewel nestled against her ample breasts; a small, frail mulatto girl wearing a black-and-white-check madras headtie whose pale eyes were boring into him; and a chubby baby who was exhausted by the trip, going by her shrieks.
    “This is Victoire, our new cook.” Anne-Marie made the introductions with an air of authority.
    Oh,
Boniface said to himself, befuddled by Victoire’s gaze,
so we needed a new cook
.
Flaminia wasn’t enough.
    “À vòt sèvis, mèt!”
the mulatto girl murmured in Creole, in a voice that, like her gaze, sent shivers down his spine.
    Before he had had time to emit the sound of an answer or pronounce a banal
“ka ou fè
” greeting, the trio had left the room and swept up the stairs.
    Flaminia reappeared carrying the cod
brandade
and red beans.
    “She’s putting her in the Regency room,” she hissed.
    She hated Anne-Marie, whose spitefulness outdid her own. In her youth, she had brought Boniface up during his childhood on Marie-Galante, been one of his father’s mistresses, and kept house for him while he was a bachelor. For him, she had left the scents of her island for this filthy town that stank of excrement and dead dogs and where the
dames-gabrielle
shamelessly traded their charms.
    The room they half jokingly called the Regency room, the loveliest in the house, was situated on the third floor. It owed its name to two Regency-style armchairs with lion’s feet and a sofa in the same style, mounted likewise on lion’s claws, which served as a bed.
    More than anyone, Boniface dreaded Anne-Marie’s moods and stinging repartee. He kept mum about the extravagant idea of attributing the Regency room to a cook and her brat, thus deserving once more the pet name Flaminia had given to him, Pontius Pilate.
    Disgusted, Flaminia showered him with a look of commiseration.

S IX
 
    Officially, then, Victoire was hired as a cook in the service of the Walbergs. Yet there is no document to confirm this. With her very first meal she astounded the entire family. Far from merely cooking Creole dishes with panache, she used her imagination to invent them. On her second day, she served up a guinea fowl
au gros sel
and two types of cabbage that sent Boniface, who, we must confess, was already under her charm, into raptures.
    What I am claiming is the legacy of this woman, who apparently did not leave any. I want to establish the link between her creativity and mine, to switch from the savors, the colors, and the smells of meat and vegetables to those of words. Victoire did not have a name for her dishes and that didn’t seem to bother her. Most of her days she spent locked up in the temple of her kitchen, a small shack behind the house, set slightly back from the washhouse. Not saying a word, head bent, absorbed over her kitchen range like a writer hunched over her computer. She would let nobody chop a chive or press a lemon, as if in the kitchen no task was humble enough when aiming at perfection. She frequently tasted the food, but once the composition was completed, she never touched it again.
    Her reputation for the time being, however, remained withinthe boundaries of the rue de Nassau. Since neither Anne-Marie nor Boniface entertained at home, folk in La Pointe for a long time knew nothing of the jewel they possessed.
    In the meantime, they settled into a ménage of three, even four, whispered malicious