Master of the Crossroads (37 page)

Riau knocked on the door frame. Silence, a creak of floor boards, voices muttering low. A sort of curtain hung before the door, made of reeds broken into short lengths and gathered in star-like clusters on knots of closely hanging threads. Behind the reed curtain, the door opened, but no more than an inch. They waited, but there was no further sign.

“This one is looking for him they call Choufleur,” Riau said. “Also the woman Nanon, with her child.”

“They are not here.” A woman’s voice, rusty but melodious beneath the rust. “Go away.”

“But, I beg you,” the doctor said, and the door stopped closing. Riau looked at him solemnly, but the doctor did not know what else to say. He took the snuffbox from his pocket and held it with his two cupped hands containing it like water. Behind them the wind breathed through the trees. The whole house seemed to take a deep inhalation, and the door swung inward. Through the suspended bundles of reed the doctor could discern a tall and slender silhouette.

“Wait where you are,” the voice said, and the figure turned and faded into the interior.

The doctor exchanged a glance with Riau. He put the snuffbox back in his pocket. From deep in the house came a murmuring too low to be understood. Then the silhouette reappeared.

“My husband wishes to know if you will sit at our table,
blanc,
and call us by our proper names.”

“Of course—it would be my honor.”

“Very well,” the voice said. “
Vous êtes le bienvenu.
Welcome to Habitation Fortier.”

The doctor hesitated a moment more, then parted the reed curtain with both hands and went inside.

For the long duration of the evening meal the doctor did not in any way allude to Nanon or Choufleur or for his real reason for being there, but instead affected to be paying a social call. The conversation was rigid with politeness, couched in formal, antique French. The doctor was careful to address his hosts as “Monsieur,” or “Madame Fortier,” whenever he spoke to either of them. They talked mostly of nonpolitical news from France: art, the theater, scientific and medical developments—quite as if the colony were not shredded by war all around them. Riau followed the conversation, alert but without saying much himself. He ate diligently, though not too fast. The cooking was unusually good. No wine, but their water glasses were fragile balloons of crystal.

Monsieur Fortier was considerably darker than his wife: a
griffe, sacatra, marabou?
—the doctor had not perfectly mastered the complex colonial categories for mixed blood. Fortier was also younger than his wife, though prematurely bald. He spoke little, in short, clipped phrases, and ate sparingly, without pleasure. Sometimes his whole face would seem to swell and he would lean forward over his plate as if he would burst into some violent reaction. But instead he would always maintain his silence, the tension draining from his face by slow degrees.

Madame Fortier seemed perfectly at ease, untroubled by her husband’s peculiarly noticeable discomfort. She was a graceful and nimble conversationalist—skilled in that art as any Frenchwoman, though without the slightest tinge of frivolity. Partly because of her great height and her regal posture, she cut a striking figure at the foot of the dark wooden table; also, though she was past the middle fifties, she was still a handsome woman, and must certainly have been a splendid beauty in her youth. In the light of the guttering candles, her complexion was the color of pale honey. Her hair was iron-gray laced with white, like moon-rays pouring out from her face, then swept back and captured by the complex turban which rose from the back of her head.

“Take your chair out onto the porch,” she told the doctor, once the meal had concluded. “Someone will serve you a glass of rum.”

The doctor did as he was bidden. With a brief word of thanks to the Fortiers, Riau went to the room they’d been assigned to share. Outside, the doctor placed his chair against the house wall, and sat looking out over the starlit terraces below. His mule, tethered on a long cord, looked up at him, snuffled and went back to grazing. Behind the reed curtain the doctor seemed to hear the same sort of muttering as he had that afternoon before they’d been admitted to the house.

Presently Madame Fortier came out alone, carrying a tray loaded with two glasses, a calabash bottle, a clay jug, and a cut lemon. From the calabash she poured a measure of rum and passed it to the doctor, then indicated the water jug with a tilt of her head. The doctor declined. He squeezed a few drops from the lemon into his drink while she filled her own glass. They drank.

“Santé,”
Madame Fortier said. She sighed, then busied herself filling and lighting a small black pipe.

“Monsieur Fortier has retired?”

“Monsieur Fortier has gone to the
ajoupa
he keeps on the other side of this hill,” she said. “Sometimes he likes to sleep on a straw mat on the ground and listen to the night song of the
siffleur montagne.
Perhaps it is romantic, but my bones are too old for it. I hear the night birds very well from my own bedroom. Also, my husband is discontented by your presence here,
blanc.
He is no lover of white people. He would have had me send you away, but I told him that as you wished to show us courtesy, you deserved our courtesy in return.”

“Merci pour ça,”
the doctor said. The hot burst of rum in his throat reassured him.

“De rien,”
said Madame Fortier. “Regarding your purpose here, I can also offer you exactly nothing, except my advice that you abandon it.”

“Have they been here?”

Madame Fortier’s lips tightened on her pipe stem. “Yes, but briefly.” She blew out a wreath of smoke. “But they are not here now, and I do not know where they have gone. I tell you,
blanc,
if the woman has left you, let her go. What does it matter?”

“I think of the boy, if nothing else.”

“What can this boy be to you, this little
sang-mêlé?
”

“He is my son,” the doctor said. The sentence rang between his ears. Perhaps he had never made this statement aloud in the presence of another person.

“Give me the snuffbox,” Madame Fortier said.

The doctor complied. Madame Fortier lifted the box near to her face and examined the fleur-de-lys stamped on the lid. She turned it this way and that in the vague starlight, and ran her finger around its scalloped edge.

“I can tell you something of such sons,” she said. “For example, there is my son Jean-Michel, whom you more probably know as Choufleur—this matter of naming is something to be discussed. His father is a
blanc
like you, the Sieur de Maltrot—perhaps you knew him also.”

“By reputation only,” the doctor said. “Well, by sight. He disappeared during the first months of the insurrection.”

“He is dead,” Madame Fortier said, still turning the snuffbox in her hands. “As you may be also,
blanc,
if you persist. I have for my son the feeling of any mother. I also recognize that he is vicious as a poisonous snake or a mad dog. He would certainly kill you,
blanc,
if you put yourself in his way, and perhaps he is even hoping you will do so. I tell you this for your own benefit—it is nothing to me if you live or die. I do not love you. Take more rum whenever you are ready.”

“Thank you,” the doctor said. He reached for the calabash.
“Permettez-moi.”

“But you are too kind.” Madame Fortier dropped the snuffbox into the lap of her skirts and held out her glass for him to replenish.
“Santé,”
she said. They drank.

“You have not the manner of a
colon,
” she told him. “Perhaps you have not been long in Saint Domingue?”

“I came in the summer of ninety-one,” the doctor said. “About two months before the risings.”

“Ah,” she said. “You chose an interesting moment, no?” She took a moment to refill and light her pipe. “But let us consider this matter of names. Possibly you do not know that before the commissioners brought the new laws from France, we who are of mixed blood were not allowed the use of our own names—not if they derived from the names of white people. But no, it must be
le-dit Maltrot,
the
so-called
Fortier
. . . Thus you may comprehend the sensitivity of my husband on this point.”

“It is very understandable,” the doctor said.

“For similar reasons, my son has seized the name of his white father and even his title and now calls himself the Sieur de Maltrot. Whereas his stable name Choufleur was first coined by his father, as a mockery of his freckled skin, as if the child were a speckled cauliflower. Maltrot invented it for spite, and still it was taken up by friends and family, and I used it myself with no thought of harm, and yet my son cannot hear this name without humiliation. Still, why must he rush to claim his father’s name? Maltrot was cruel, even for a white man.”

“That was an aspect of his reputation,” the doctor said. Madame Fortier had fallen silent. He heard the whistling of a night bird somewhere above the cliffs that embraced the valley.

“Of course, cruelty is the first quality of any and all
blancs,
” she said. “Cruelty and greed, no matter how you may hide it. The Church was the first and best disguise. But whatever God created white people must be sharp-beaked as a hawk, or better yet, a vulture. Now we see
blancs
coming out of France blathering of equality and brotherhood, but underneath it is the same, I tell you—cruelty and greed. I challenge you, find me one Indian on this island—here or on the Spanish side. Three hundred years ago Ayiti held five kingdoms under five
caciques
—there were half a million of them. One finds their tools and relics everywhere, but not an Indian, not one. All of them destroyed by the whites. And now the
blancs
are doing the same work in Africa. Will they rest until the last children of Guinée have been stamped out of existence altogether?”

As this question appeared to be rhetorical, the doctor kept his silence, reaching unobtrusively for the calabash of rum.

“Bien,”
she said. “You may imagine the difficulty for those of us who have mixed blood. If one has a mind to think or a heart to feel. One is neither one thing nor the other. Well, should I wish myself out of existence? No, instead I wish the white people to the devil, while I myself remain at peace. My husband too has reached his own accommodation. But so we return to the subject of my son.”

Madame Fortier applied fire to the bowl of her little pipe. Discreetly, the doctor trickled rum into his glass. He did not bother with the lemon.

“You will understand that my son Jean-Michel was, according to the laws of
blancs,
the chattel and property of his father. As was I—for I was born into the
atelier
of slaves at Maltrot’s plantation on the slopes by Vallière. Now, Maltrot used me with tremendous cruelty, as he did all women whom he carnally knew. His delight was to take the pleasures of love by force and to make the act itself and everything surrounding it as painful and humiliating to his partner as he might. In all such things he was very ingenious. Perhaps by reason of this predilection, he never made a marriage with a
blanche
and so produced no heirs or descendants other than colored persons like my son Jean-Michel. Although indeed the other children I bore to him did not live long, all instead falling victim in infancy to illnesses such as
mal de mâchoire.
”

Madame Fortier turned and looked at him penetratingly. “As you are a medical man, perhaps you know something of this sickness.”

“Only a little,” said the doctor. He knew that lockjaw was a very common reason of death among the newborns of slave women, and although there were many theories as to its cause, none had been definitely proven. “I myself have witnessed few cases, for since the insurrections began here, the illness appears to have greatly decreased.”

“Well,” Madame Fortier said, smiling a little. “
Monsieur le médecin,
you are not without intelligence. Perhaps, with patience, you may learn something. If, for example, you were to gain the confidence of one of those old African crones who minister to women brought to bed in childbirth, you might discover that, if someone drives a long needle or pin through the soft place at the top of the skull of a newborn child, the wound is next to invisible, or no more than an insect bite—yet the child’s jaws freeze and lock completely so that, unable to take nourishment, it will soon perish.”

The doctor felt a chill which began at the extremity of his fingers and rapidly advanced along his arms toward his vital center. He felt his heart and lungs shrinking on themselves. “You speak of murder,” he said.

“By no means,” said Madame Fortier. “You have misunderstood me altogether. And in any case, supposing you were to gain the confidence of the proper old
paysanne,
she might very well tell you that it is better for a child born into a world of hellish torments to be released and go straightaway home to Africa,
Guinée en bas de l’eau.
”

The mountain breeze, which was more than cool, again swept over the valley, shivering the branches of the coffee trees. The doctor gulped at his rum, which failed to warm him.

“But forgive me,” said Madame Fortier, “I wander from my subject. Maltrot took a peculiar interest in his surviving son. Oh, he did not acknowledge his parentage, not openly. But he sent the boy to the priest of Vallière to be taught to write and cipher. And Maltrot himself taught him to play chess and dice and cards, and to drink rum, and wine and brandy when these were to be had—laughing at his inebriation, to be sure. He set the boy to learn the general workings of both a sugar and a coffee plantation, so that in time he gained some competence as an overseer and even as a manager. He saw that my son learned horsemanship and even (this at first surprised me) permitted him to acquire some skill with sword and pistol. Afterward he put him into the
maréchaussée
to be a catcher of runaway slaves. Choufleur grew most adept at this—so that he soon became the leader of that cavalry. He became an expert hunter of wild men, and he also learned especially to savor—for he has that same strain of cruelty inherited from the father—the whippings and amputations and other tortures visited on the recaptured runaways.