Drum (21 page)

Alix was completely enraptured with her lifel Tamboura had turned out to be even more than she had anticipated and his performances so far exceeded Bonaventure's that she could never regret her Dominican slave again. Her daylight hours were but a prelude to the night and each night she discovered new joys with Tamboura. Theirs was entirely a union of the flesh. AlLx wanted it that way, accepted it for what it was and gloried in it.

Tamboura could have learned much from Alix and she from him, but they were too engrossed in exploring each

Other's bodies. The contact of black flesh and white was enough—the white mentality of Alix never searched the black mind of Tamboura, nor his hers. Their fierce appeal for each other lay in their polar extremes; had Alix inculcated Tamboura with any degree of her civilization, he would have lost some of his native savagery which was his strongest appeal for her. Similarly, it was the sophistication of Alix, in contrast to the primitive responses of the Negro wenches he had known, which appealed to Tamboura. His relations with them had been basic and fundamental. With Alix there was always some subtle nuance of passion which surprised amazed and sometimes even shocked him.

It was enough for them that hands touched, bodies touched, lips touched. Their desires were primitive and their satisfaction complete. Once their desires were satiated, they were content to lie in each other's arms without words until such time as desire was roused again. Their conversation rarely exceeded words of endearment, commands of love or such elemental things as hunger, thirst and sleep. Lacking conversation, they avoided all the pitfalls of disagreement and argument. They met on only one ground and on that they achieved perfect harmony.

One of the unused bedchambers with a huge old Spanish bed on the third floor had been cleaned and aired, ostensibly for Tamboura and Rachel. But on the rare occasions when Rachel used the room, to convince don Cesar that she and Tamboura were still enjoying each other, Rachel slept on the bed, protected by the ouanga, and Tamboura on the floor. These nights became fewer and fewer after don Cesar promoted both M'dong and Omo to grooms and had them accompany him to the city, for added protection against the runaway slaves who came down in bands from the mountain hideouts to rob and murder unprotected travelers at night. Then Tamboura moved out to the loft over the stables to share a mattress on the floor with his friends, glad of the opportunity for male companionship. He had found that even he was not always capable of satisfying Alix—the woman was insatiable—and his nights with M'dong and Omo became a welcome respite.

To Tamboura it did not seem inconsistent that he should share his armfs bed at night and arise in the morning to do the menial work of the household and stables during the day. The work around the house on Colon Street was far easier than chopping cane on the plantation and he knew

that at any time he might be called from his duties as stable boy, floor scrubber or painter to satisfy Alix* whim of the moment. She delighted in the unusual. When he came to her, his black skin liberally bespattered with whitewash, he was all the more appealing. When he took her on the dirty mattress on the floor of the loft over the stable, she found it a welcome change from the big Spanish bed.

She made the discovery that rum released what few inhibitions he still possessed and made him more savagely amenable to her wishes. Drunk, Tamboura forgot his Spanish and lapsed into Hausa. He did not become angry or vicious. Rum merely stripped off the superficial gilding of his slight civilization so that Alix became for him merely a girl from his village and the civilized room a tamarisk bush under the African moon. She could not decide whether she enjoyed him more drunk or sober.

The bedroom on the third floor became their rendezvous because it was less subject to discovery than her bedroom, which opened off the main sala on the second floor. The danger of her own bed as a trysting place had been made most apparent one afternoon when don Cesar's aimt, the superannuated Tia Maria of the Mendoza palace, came to call to offer her stufl&ly formal and most unwilling congratulations on her nephew's coming marriage. Tamboura had only had time to crouch among Alix' frothy laces in the big mahogany wardrobe and there he had remained during the entire stay of the aged aunt, while Alix excused her deshabille on the grounds of a serious headache, which she hoped might speed the aunt on her way before poor Tamboura smothered in the Alengon flounces.

The days of entrancement slipped by into weeks and the weeks into months and there was no diminishing of ardor on the part of the lovers. Each found the other as responsive and entirely appealing as on the first afternoon they had discovered each other. Each meeting was an entirely new soaring of ecstatic wonder and joy. They never tired of each other and their capacity for repeated enjoyment was limited only by Tamboura's powers of recuperation.

Don Cesar, ignorantly blissful, was never disappointed on his visits. Alix, fresh from the arms of Tamboura, could well afford to make Cesar happy as a sop for all he was providing and about to provide. M'dong and Omo also anticipated these visits for to them it meant a change from the routine of the finca, a chance to see the city and an opportunity to

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visit with Tamboura. They were aware, through his prideful boasting to them, of his intrigue with his ama and although terrified at what he might suffer if discovered, they were proud of his ability to possess a white woman and not a little jealous of his success. They too had enjoyed admiring and appraising glances from Alix, but although she might admire them, her infatuation with Tamboura and her suspicion that neither of them could possibly exceed his capacity for satisfying her confined her to admiration only. Had Tamboura been absent and had either Omo or M'dong arrived without don Cesar, she would not have hesitated to instigate further explorations, but the occasion never arose.

However as has been said, there was a fourth angle to the situation, an angle not of joy but of venomous jealousy, searing frustration and noxious virulence, all of which seethed inside the outwardly placid Rachel. She realized that the perverted love she had for Alix would never be requited and she had accepted the fact and grown to live with it. All she desired was to lavish her affection on her mistress and by so doing she felt amply rewarded in the joy of serving her. Rachel realized the economic security the marriage to Don Cesar would bring her mistress and she was as anxious for it as Alix, She also knew that the only motive that impelled Alix was don Cesar's money and position. As long as Alix did not love him, Rachel was willing to be a member of that freemasonry among women which prompts them to band together in fleecing the more stupid male.

But Tamboura was something else! That her adored mistress would give herself to this black savage was as repulsive to Rachel as if she were a white woman herself. That Alix would allow her lovely body to be pawed over by a black animal, only a few years out of the African jungle, was incomprehensible to the half-white Rachel with her predominantly white viewpoint. That Tamboura was a man as well as a slave, a Negro and a beast in Rachel's eyes, only contributed to her jealousy and her desire to rid herself and her mistress of him.

The fetish of cock's feathers had served to frighten Tamboura, but her secret prayers and incantations to the voodoo gods of St. Domingue to destroy Tamboura had brought no results. Losing faith in her own ability to bring the gods to wreak their vengeance on him, she had saved as many centavos as she could from the household money which Alix entrusted to her. When the centavos had mounted to a

peseta, she visited the house of a nahigo bruja across the i harbor in Regla, seeking her assistance to accomplish some f horrible death for Tamboura. The bruja demanded certain i things from Tamboura's body and this posed a difficult prob- : lem for Rachel. The fingernail paring she carefully picked from the floor one day after Tamboura had been trimming i his nails in the kitchen with one of her sharp knives. The : little tuft of pubic hair she saved one hair at a time, gleaned from a careful examination of the sheets before she laun- : dered them. The small flask of urine had been drawn from the chamber pot he used and the dried semen scraped from a discarded towel.

Armed with these important ingredients, she returned to the bruja's house in Regla and watched the old crone while she, with many incantations, fashioned a clay image of an unmistakably masculine figure which contained the parts of Tamboura Rachel had collected. A long steel needle stood upright in a hole in the image's navel. Rachel was carefully ^ instructed in the exact method whereby she could secure a particularly agonizing death for Tamboura. She was to remove; the needle and plunge it deeply into the hole, reciting at the same time an incantation to Erzulie, the consort of Dambala, i chief among the African gods. Rachel learned the precise) words of the incantation in the bastard French which had come over from St. Domingue with the voodoo worship.

Erzulie kalika elu

A la loa ki red.

Erzulie u made kocho noir

M'apeS ba u li.

Erzulie made kabrit noir de pye

M'apee ba u li.

Erzuli kalika elu

You ask for a black pig

I will give you one

Erzuli you ask for a black two-footed goat

I will give you one.

Each night behind the closed shutters of her room, Rachel' set the candle on the floor and spread a clean white cloth beside it with the clay image upon it. Again and again she! stabbed with the needle, recited the words and prayed to Erzulie. But all her efforts were wasted. Tamboura continued

as robust and healthy as ever. She passed the image through the flame of the candle but it only seemed to create a more intense fire within him. One night, in desperation, she smashed the little image to bits with a hammer, grinding the powdered clay into the floor with her heel. The next morning Tamboura greeted her with a leer that bespoke new heights of prowess during the past night and wolfed down a breakfast heartier than ever.

She consulted other brujas and brujos, stealing more and more until Alix started complaining about the high cost of food and prettily begged don Cesar for more housekeeping money.

Rachel was convinced that had she been back in St. Domingue, she could have accomplished Tamboura's death as easily as she had managed the end of Bonaventure. The bocor in St. Domingue had effected that in a matter of weeks, although unfortunately Bonaventure's death in defense of Alix was so heroic as to enshrine him in Alix' memory. Certainly the nahigo of Cuba was not as powerful as its parent, the voodoo of St. Domingue. She abandoned Erzulie in favor of Baron Guede, the god of death, but he was as unmindful of her prayers as Erzulie. Even Dambala, the all-powerful, turned a deaf ear to her prayers. When she finally located a Dominican bocor who had fled from Port au Prince she felt she had solved the problem, but the powerful ouanga she had purchased from him and placed under the bed that Tamboura shared with Alix in the upper chamber produced no results. Rachel was so certain it would that she had spent the whole night crouched on the stairs listening for Tamboura's death rattle. All she heard were the sounds of violent lovemaking which sickened her so that she ran to her own room below to beat upon the rough walls with maniacal frenzy until her hands were torn and bleeding.

Well, there were other waysl

There was the religion of the whites—if neither voodoo nor nanigo could help, she would try that. Each morning on her trip to market, she stopped in the old cathedral and knelt before the holy images, pouring out her demands for vengeance in fervent silence and lighting a candle so that her supplication would not be forgotten. To no availl The painted and gilded images in the cathedral were no more efficacious than the gods of Africa. Tamboura lived.

sang, got drunk and sported with her beloved mistress with more verve and puissance than ever before.

She would gladly have killed him herself—stolen up behind him some day when he was eating in the kitchen and plunged her knife in his throat. But she realized that by so doing she would forever alienate Alix, and she herself would end up in the whip yard, that feared Gehenna which struck terror to the heart of every slave in Havana. She considered poison but she knew it would inevitably be traced to her as cook, and besides she feared that Alix might partake of the same dish as Tamboura, as they often ate together. In the hope of disaster she even encouraged the picnics in the country which Alix found so entertaining, when they would go to a deserted strip of beach near Mariano, Tamboura driving the volante with Alix and Rachel imder the big black hood. While Rachel was spreading the food on a white cloth on the sand, Alix loved to have Tamboura shed his clothes and plunge into the ocean. The sight of his black body breasting the surf seemed to please her, although Tamboura was not a good swimmer and one day he had been sucked vmder by a heavy surf and nearly drowned. That it might happen again and this time disastrously, Rachel instigated more picnics and planned elaborate lunches to accompany them. But tragedy never struck and her only reward was to stand by and witness the disgusting servitude of her mistress, down on her knees, drying the salt-encrusted body of the big brute with a towel and then drawing him down onto the sand with her.

No, ever)fthing had failed! Tamboura still reigned, wielding his fleshly scepter in the little house on Colon Street, and Rachel could only beat her hands against the wall, or lie staring into the darkness of night which was no blacker than the jealousy that was consimiing her.

Then one day, whether it was due to the gods of Africa or the saints in the cathedral or a combination of both, she had an inspiration. While wandering through the almost carnival hubbub of the Mercado de Colon, in search of just the right crayfish for her mistress' supper, she spied a young quadroon sidling up to a Cuban senor. Rachel was acquainted with the type this fellow represented—more white than black with carefully shaved patillas —sideburns that stenciled each cheek with sooty black, growing down from a head of carefully arranged hair that had been Uberally greased to remove the kink. His mussed white suit aped in