Madeleine's Ghost (39 page)

It is situated at a wide bend along the river, at the center of seven thousand square acres of good black-soiled bottomland granted by Louis the Fifteenth of France to my ancestor Antoine Raoul de L'lsle de Prasères for an unknown bit of gallant service to the French crown. His secret action has passed into obscurity, not recorded at the time for high reasons of state, though one may surmise it had to do with the preservation of the dignity of the king himself.

The house itself was built tall with slave-made bricks and cypress wood cut out of the swamp. The brick walls of the ground floor are so wide that as a child I could barely span them with my arms outstretched. They enclose a dark, cool cave of arched doorways and barrels of wine and coiled rope and other odds and ends, where I used to play on the hot summer days. The two upper stories are constructed of cypress timbers with sand and moss and horsehair mixed with plaster in between the posts, and in all the bedrooms you can see the stout timbers of the beams, which bear the mark of the carpenter's adze. A set of horseshoe-shaped stairs lead from the ground up to the first gallery, which wraps in French style around the house, while the second gallery above is reached by a freestanding staircase of curving cypress just inside the front hall.

We are famous upriver and down for these features and for the second gallery, which is unique in all of Louisiana. My mother placed many plants along the length of this gallery. It was once her favorite place to cradle me when I was an infant and suffering from the colic. The plants remain there today, ferns and banana trees and flowering bushes in pots. They give our top gallery the aspect of the famous Hanging Gardens, which a Babylonian king once built for his mistress, and which was one of the wonders of the world.

You have no doubt seen the plantation home of Jean Noël Destrehan, who was a friend of Bonaparte's and who they say once received the gift of an imperial bathtub, slightly used, with imperial grime from the emperor's fat body still visible around the rim. In any case, Destrehan Manor is generally regarded throughout the region as a dwelling of striking beauty and elegance. I understand that since my hasty departure a Scotsman has wed Lelia, the daughter of the family, and improvements have been completed, with the addition of Greek-style columns to the facade. This is a pity. Destrehan was a house built after the French fashion, without the pompous Grecianisms favored by the American planters.

Belle Azure resembles Destrehan before the recent grotesque additions but is much more beautiful and a good deal larger. The Prasères family was once known for its generative power. My great-grandfather, Etienne Charles Marie de Prasères, sired twenty-two children off two wives. Twelve of the children survived infancy and lived comfortably at Belle Azure until marriage. The great house was meant for broods of this size. We are lucky today to see a family that exceeds eight children. Perhaps our forebears were better, stronger people than we are today, as many insist, but I do not believe it. The real reason is simple: You must first have a happy marriage to bring such a lot of children into the world. And happy marriages, for one reason or another, are rare in these complicated times.

Listen, this is a whore's piece of wisdom: Nothing makes a better aphrodisiac than happiness.

Even now in the sordid exile I have come to, I can close my eyes and picture Belle Azure, down to the last detail.

From the top gallery in the spring, you can smell the countryside blooming just before dawn, then the sun ri
sing
hot over the fields spread like a brown furrowed cloak down to the river. In the diminishing light of a winter dusk, the blue walls of the house glow the remorseful blue of the sky after a storm. In summer, seen from the windows of the second gallery, the horizon toward the Gulf is all lilac heat shimmer and the air is dense and still. Then there are the vessels—sail and steam—coming and going upriver
and down day and night, whistles blowing as we light the great first-floor gallery for a party and the music spills out over the yard. And the gray of dawn in the fall, hunting friends of Papa's waiting impatiently below, their horses pawing the gravel of the drive, breath rising as white clouds into the air. And always, the green margins of the bayou and the halo of birds rising out of the swamp.

Belle Azure is my beautiful blue star above the river. Everyone must belong somewhere. I belong there. I love its very wood and brick and plaster. Perhaps in the end true happiness in life consists of knowing where you belong and staying put. Circumstance and ill fortune and the necessity of my revenge have taken me away from my home for too many years. But I have made secret plans. And one way or another design and tenacity will take me back again.

At noon on the fifth day after I horsewhipped Albane on the gallery, I heard Papa's tilbury turn up the drive. An hour passed. Then he came up the stairs and entered the brat's room, where he stayed just long enough to examine her welts, which were even then receding into harmless pink bruises. Then he went away a second time. He did not come in to see me; he did not even say a word through my door. I stepped out on the gallery in the dusk and watched him drive off toward New Orleans. This is when I first began to be afraid that something terrible would happen to me. Two weeks later Papa came back, and this time he ascended to my room without even bothering to remove his traveling clothes.

As I feared, he would not let me speak. When I tried to explain my actions, he struck me across the mouth with the back of his hand. Then he told me that I had developed a malicious and spiteful temperament that had caused the death of a field slave worth five hundred dollars, that I had beaten an innocent orphan girl who had received such a shock from it that her life still hung in the balance. He appeared to be in anguish, and I trembled because I had made him unhappy and because I did not want to be punished.

Then his demeanor changed, and he sank down on a stool and put his
head in his hands and began to shed tears. These frightened me more than anything I had yet seen.

“I have been unmindful of you for a long while,” he said at last. “I thought that it was your cousin who needed looking after, not you, Madeleine, You have always been my strong one. Even when you were an infant and death took your mother, you were strong and you did not cry. I should have remarried or sent you to the convent school with the Ursuline nuns, like other girls of the province. Perhaps the sisters would have given you some moral training, cooled your hot temperament. Now it is too late for such measures.”

Then he was quiet a little while, and his tears ceased, and he stood and went to the door. But before he stepped into the hall, he turned, and there was a great sadness in his voice. “I have betrothed you to Don André de la Roca, a wealthy gentleman of New Orleans,” he said. “The contracts are signed and agreed upon, your dowry fixed. I may have cause to regret this thing, but it is too late. You will be married in September, a week after your fifteenth birthday.”

The day of my wedding a sudden and vicious squall of hail swept across the Place d'Armes. This was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the event. The fist-size rocks of ice bounced off the cobbles and sent the surprised citizenry running for the covered walkways of the islets. Dogs were knocked senseless in the street, gulls fell out of the sky over the river, and a black cloud like the smoke from a terrible fire blossomed over the Cabildo.

The St. Louis Cathedral stood mostly empty, as if for the funeral of an unpopular minor official. I remember a wrinkled old lady with a yellow face who sat in the front row—my husband's duenna. She had been with him since his early youth in St.-Domingue, was of mixed blood and entirely mad. We knelt, and the priest droned on and on in Latin. My dress was beautiful, covered with tiny freshwater pearls and silver thread-work that shone even in the dull light. No one noticed my dress. I kept sneaking looks at my new husband out of the corner of my eye. This was the first time I had ever seen the man, and my impressions now confirmed my worst fears. He was old,
narrow-faced and cruel-looking, but most of all old. He could not be described as handsome in any way. And my heart grew small and still and withered as the priest said the final words of the sacrament.

Later, in my new house on Esplanade, only fifteen people, all business acquaintances of my husband's, came to the wedding party. My father did not attend, citing a touch of the gout, though he was perfectly healthy. The mad duenna crawled around the floor as if looking for something she had lost. People stepped over her, ignored her as you ignore a dog. My husband did not speak a word to me, barely looked in my direction. I found my way upstairs to the wedding chamber and wept into the embroidered coverlet of the bed, as downstairs the men ate and drank spirituous liquors and smoked cigars, the stench of their smoke rising through the floor. It was more like the sale of a prize mare than a wedding.

After a few hours passed, the guests went to finish their drinking elsewhere and my new husband came into the room without so much as a knock at the door. He instructed me in a cold manner to remove my clothes and lie back on the bed. I was too stricken with fear not to obey him. When I lay naked and trembling there, he told me to put my hands on my breasts, to knead them like so and to pinch the teats. Then he dropped his trousers and stared at my hands at work and stroked himself until he was hard enough to penetrate me. This done, he began to thrust back and forth, oblivious to my cries of pain and with a look of disgust on his face. He left the chamber immediately after he was finished. I was just fifteen, remember, a virgin and quite innocent in these matters.

Don André came back the next night and the next, staying only long enough to complete the act. He repeated these conjugal visits as many times as necessary to get me with child. That is all I saw of him until the day, two weeks before the birth of my first girl, when he turned up in the middle of the afternoon and requested an interview in the front drawing room.

The jalousies were drawn against the heat. I wore a black dress, as if in mourning. The room was full of shadows. Two small coffees were brought. He asked me how I was getting along. I was too stunned to offer a reply to this man, my tormentor.

He went on, polite enough, and spoke to me as if he were a reasonable fellow and not a monster.

“Allow me to be candid,” he said. “I have contracted this marriage for two reasons. First, because of your family and antecedents, who include among them Rodrigo Diaz del Vivar, El Cid, the great Spanish knight. Second, I am a man of much wealth but in possession of little land, and your father is a man of much land but in possession of little wealth. Our union has thus united both cash and property, which is as firm a basis for a good marriage as any. Do I wound your feelings? No? Good, then I will continue in a more delicate vein. You must of course understand that while I bear you no malice, I do not love you and am not interested in your body as a thing of pleasure. In any case it is unseemly for an aristocratic white woman to find any enjoyment in this area. It is a compliment to your family that I look for my pleasure elsewhere. From now on I will come to your bedroom once a month, though I urge you not to attach any sentiment to the generative act.…”