Madeleine's Ghost (37 page)

She is eager as a child. She disappears into the dark outer room and returns with a squarish bottle and two small crystal glasses. She hip slides her way onto the mattress and tucks her legs under in the same way I have seen Antoinette approach a bed. She sets the glasses on a flat pillow between us, pours out the thick red wine from the bottle, hands me a glass, and fills her own. The stuff is strong and sweet and like fire. She readjusts the shift to reveal her breasts more completely and leans back against the carved baseboard, stroking a nipple with an idle finger.

“I like to get drunk,” she says. “It is the whore's solace. But only on good wine, so you don't feel so terrible in the morning.” She takes a greedy gulp of the wine. “This is a fine Madeira, don't you think?”

I nod.

“The captain of a merchantman who sometimes comes to lay with me brings a few bottles as a present when his vessel puts in from Spain. My father was very fond of Madeira. He used to have cases of the stuff brought downriver from New Orleans. Did you know my father?”

“I don't think so.”

“My father was well liked. They respected him up and down the river from Natchez to Pointe de la Hache. He was that rare thing, an honest and successful man. But he put too much faith in the inherent goodness of people. And he betrothed his daughter to a monster, and now his daughter is a whore.”

We drink for a while in silence. She refills our glasses several times. I am getting drunk. The walls of the room are painted a vaginal pink.
There is little by way of decor except for the vanity and the bed, and I recall Molesworth's old Z.Z. Top poster with some nostalgia. Above the headboard hangs a small oval portrait of an arrogant and familiar-looking olive-skinned man in the uniform of the Spanish kings. He stares down at us with malevolent black eyes. On a sash across his chest are pinned the platinum and diamond stars of a few forgotten aristocratic orders. Two dueling pistols stand in an open box beside him.

Soon the bottle of Madeira is done, and there remains only the sediment, grainy and bitter as coffee grounds at the bottom of the glass.

The ghost is waiting, her eyes as lightless as stones.

“Tell me,” I say at last.

“What do you wish to know?”

“Everything.”

M
y name is Madeleine Hippolyte Félicité de Prasères de la Roca. I was born to riches at Belle Azure Plantation in Plaquemines, Louisiana, a few years after General Jackson defeated the English at Chalmette and sent Pakenham's body home in a barrel of rum from which, as the story goes, his soldiers drank unknowingly on the way back to England. I am told we are all equal under the wings of the American Eagle, and I have seen a painting in the governor's house to this effect, but I don't believe it. I insist with pride, as my father insisted, that the royal blood of both France and Spain runs in my veins and that I am better than most. Strange words from a whore, but my story is a strange and sad one.

My mother, Emmeline Françoise d'Aurevilley, was born in France in Normandy in an ancient château and came to Louisiana with her family during the Terror of the Revolution. She met my father at a ball at the old Marigny Plantation in the second week of May, five years before the Americans bought Louisiana from France. At seven in the evening they danced once to an old-fashioned gavotte à la polonaise and were married on the lawn the next afternoon, as the sun went red over the river. All the guests cried when my parents knelt before the priest, because they were both so beautiful and so young—and you know the open way our people have when they are happy or sad. Always the tears and the handkerchiefs.

My father was tall and robust with reddish hair. My mother was both fair and dark, with the thick black tresses and gray eyes that you can see I have inherited. Mandeville himself gave his own bedroom for the wedding chamber and a thousand Spanish gold dollars as a wedding present. And the Spanish governor, Señor Salcedo, who was present, exempted the newly-weds from taxation for a year.

Unfortunately I have no memory of my mother except for vague impressions, much like the dreams of a very young child. She died of the fever of the black vomit when I was barely two years old. The only picture of her that remains is a small cameo painted on bone by Mazzini, the famous miniaturist, during my parents' honeymoon in Europe. This is the single item of any value that I took with me when I left Belle Azure for the North. I
have the miniature hidden here beneath a loose board in the floor and remove it on occasion when the last man has left my bed in the evening.

As I gaze at my mother's soft face, I think had this woman lived to temper my father's judgments, my life might have turned out differently. When she looks down on me now—if we can indeed look upon life from the blackness of death—she sees a whore and not the virtuous daughter she had hoped to give the world. I am saddened by this fact alone. The rest I brought on myself, through jealousy and passion and pride.

But I was not always a whore. My story is first the story of two little girls. Myself and my cousin Albane d'Aurevilley. As a child I lived in the big house at Belle Azure—it seems like paradise now—surrounded by fields and bayou and river, by the green gifts of the Plaquemines delta.

When I was ten years old, my cousin Albane came from the city to live with us because her father and her mother, who was my father's first cousin, had died of the fever. A terrible epidemic swept through New Orleans that summer, and the streets were full of wagons loaded with corpses. I heard the house slaves talking about this, and some said it was the curse of God on that city for its wickedness. Perhaps this is true, for it is a wicked city. From the top gallery, if the wind blew downriver, you could hear the plague cannon going off and see the smoke of the tar barrels rising into the sky like black ribbons on the horizon.

I remember that summer well because of Albane and because Papa returned from his trip to Paris unexpectedly in early June. He had been gone many months. He was mostly gone from Belle Azure in those days, and though I did not know it then, I was a very lonely child. I was surrounded by people, it is true. There were at various times in the house maiden aunts and spinster cousins who made a show of affection for me, but who really did not care one bit whether I lived or died, and of course, there were always the house slaves.

Zetie, the light-skinned mulatto who nursed me when my mother died, possessed, I think, some genuine feelings for me, but the condition of bound servitude is not one that fosters untainted emotions. Sometimes, when
no one was looking, she was very cruel indeed. She beat me where it would leave no marks, and she stole my pretty things—little trinkets and bits of lace—and gave them to her own children, who lived in the quarters behind the house with the rest of the slaves.

Once, when I asked Papa why he was so often away, he replied that life at the place where he had been so happy with my mother saddened him greatly. But he never took me with him when he went on his travels, and I suspect that it was not the house or the plantation that saddened him but my own countenance, for it resembles my mother's almost exactly. We are all alike, the women of the d'Aurevilley line. We are both fair and dark, an unusual combination of qualities. It has been so since the days of Marie de France and shall be so as long as there are women to look beautiful and men to chase after them.

But this time, when he returned from Paris, perhaps because he felt a little guilty, Papa brought me many fine gifts: painted fans and dresses, a mechanical bird that sang when you wound it up with a silver key, and a splendid china-faced doll purchased at Joquelin's, the famous toymaker of the Faubourg St.-Germain. The doll came with a box of fitted gowns, all satin and frills in the latest fashion, and her hair was black, like my own. I named her Emmeline after my mother and carried her with me everywhere. It seems ridiculous now as a grown woman to be talking about a child's doll, but the fate of that doll is a cipher for what happened afterward.

The day Albane came to live with us, Papa took the doll away from me and gave it to her. Not an hour after she set foot in our house, Albane saw the doll in my arms, coveted it, and merely asked Papa in that quiet, mysterious voice of hers if she could have the thing. He consented without a thought for my feelings because, as he said later, I had so many playthings and poor little Albane had nothing. What he did not know was that I loved the doll very much and would have given up everything else I owned to keep it for myself.

I can still recall the peculiar light on the afternoon Albane came to us. The sky was purple over the river, and rain lashed the lattices, an appropriately theatrical entry for the creature who would become the villain of my young life. She was unattractive, pinkish and pinch-faced and all bones. The
mourning dress of cheap black tulle hung limp and wet on her sharp frame and dripped stains of dye on the Gobelins carpet in the front hall. I stood on the polished stairs, clutching my doll as Papa took her to his bosom, and I shall never forget the look on her face over his shoulder—arch, possessive, and preternaturally wise. I shivered at the sight of her, and I could not meet those eyes which were an odd, unforgiving shade of blue and which even then concealed unknown powers of persuasion.

Within a month Papa moved Albane into the large bedroom opening on mine, which had been my nursery and playroom. He gave her half my clothes and had Zetie tailor them to fit the child's skinny limbs. He gave her the extravagant gift of a body slave, a young Negro girl of her own age, and he gave her his unadulterated affection.

And in the sad years that followed, Papa seemed to become even fonder of that miserable little orphan. He took her twice to performances at the French opera in New Orleans. I went with him to the city but once, and just to see a poor play of marionettes in a stall in the Place d'Armes.

When we grew older, more for Albane's benefit than my own—as the child showed a scholarly bent—he brought a pedantic young man from town to teach us Latin and mathematics and music.

It was only the music that I mastered. To this day I can play any stringed instrument, including the violin, and I can also play the piano and sing tolerably well. But Papa never praised my singing, while he praised Albane's sums and her tedious Latin compositions, usually moral tales of a falsely pious nature.

Papa was always a great reader of books. He respected knowledge more than he respected money, an attitude that is tenable only if you already have enough money to support yourself in a fine style.

Two rooms off the front gallery of Belle Azure on the second floor were set aside for his library. In one of the rooms alone stood four thousand volumes, neatly arranged on shelves along the walls. I counted them one day when I had nothing else to do. In this room also were a long table of dark
wood and a map of Louisiana and a globe that showed all the countries and continents of the world.

For hours Papa would sit in there, the lattices drawn against the heat, reading and annotating several volumes at once open before him on the table. He loved Molière, Racine, the poet André-Marie de Chénier, who was guillotined during the Revolution, the philosophic works of Pascal and Rousseau, and of course, the contemporary writer Chateaubriand, whom he had met once in Paris, though he often complained that the latter's René and
La Nouvele Atala
were full of poetic distortions and lies about the red Indians in general and the Louisiana tribes in particular.

When he became overexcited about something he was reading, he would fling open the shutters, step out onto the gallery, and declaim passages in a loud voice to whoever was passing below. The slaves thought him mad. He would make them stop and listen to him, sometimes for hours in the heat. He always wore a pair of yellow slippers and a yellow waistcoat when he read and a sort of round Turkish hat with a tassel hanging from it, which he called his reading hat.