Master of the Crossroads (46 page)

“He is old now, Pinchinat,” Toussaint continued, “but still more cunning than a spider. Well, a spider can weave all day and still a man knocks down the web with one stroke of a green switch. So Pinchinat has run back to Rigaud in the south. When we come to Le Cap, we will not find him there . . . but it was he who brought the spirit of disobedience to Villatte, I think. And from where,
mes amis?
where did that spirit come from?”

Toussaint, who seemed to have been looking out over the treetops in the direction of Marmelade, now focused on Riau.

“One must not forget the Swiss,” he said. “We have heard that it was Pinchinat who sent those soldiers to be murdered on the ship. All that web was of his weaving.”

Riau remained impassive, still as a tree. Only his eyes shifted for a moment to Guiaou, then back to some invisible inner space.

“Yes,” Toussaint said. Now his glance included them all. “As many times as the web is knocked down, the little spider returns to weave again.” He laughed and covered his mouth with his hand for a moment. When he uncovered it, the smile was gone.

“Mount up!” he said, in a loud voice. All down the line the cavalrymen obeyed him. Within ten minutes the column was strung out over the ridge above the Plaisance Valley, the leaders already descending into the verdant jungle shade.

Captain Maillart happened to be standing near the gate of the
casernes,
chatting with one of the men on post, when Doctor Hébert’s mule turned in from the Rue Espagnole. It was just sundown, and clouds boiled above Morne du Cap; the wind rose and the leaves shivered on the trees, though it would not rain. Captain Maillart offered a hand to help his friend down from the mule saddle. The doctor slipped to the ground and wobbled on his rubbery legs, bracing himself on the captain’s shoulder.

“Well met,” said Maillart. “Has Toussaint come at last?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, turning to unship his long rifle. “Or nearly—he has stopped at Haut du Cap, at the Bréda great house. For council with Pierre Michel and some others. He will enter the town tomorrow morning.”

Maillart nodded. The troops who had marched with Charles Belair and Dessalines had already overflowed the
casernes.
The colored officers who had so recently returned to obedience navigated warily among their black counterparts; so far a proper courtesy had been observed on all sides. With the men Toussaint had brought, the influx of black troops would approach ten thousand, and this was more, much more, than a show of mere brute force.

The last time such a number of blacks had descended on Le Cap (admitted to enter by Sonthonax in one of his most desperate moments), they had had come to rape, kill, loot and burn, and had left nothing but smoking foundations when they departed. Now Toussaint’s trained men had filled the town, in a state of perfect discipline and good order. The great majority of them were nearly naked but for their arms which they kept so carefully, and lived and marched on next to nothing—a yam or an ear of corn or a piece of fruit twice daily. And yet they carried themselves upright with a fierce pride. They held themselves in: there had been no looting, no foraging, no forced requisitioning, no drunkenness, no insults offered to the women of the town. A boatload of European troops would not have conducted themselves half so well if landed in this situation, as Maillart knew from more than one experience. Toussaint’s men were healthier, cleaner, better disciplined, and as reliable in the field, perhaps more so. The captain had come to feel more pride in them than in any other men he’d led.

“Have you toured the town?” he asked the doctor.

“I came straight here from the gate.” The doctor took down his saddlebags. “And you—what news?”

“Oh, I’ve been everywhere.” The captain turned his face away, looking out onto the street. “She isn’t here, Antoine.”

“You’re sure of that.”

“What knowledge is wholly certain?” the captain said wearily. “I have not turned over every stone, but I’ve looked in all the likely places. I did discover Fleur—do you remember her from the theater, the
promenade du gouvernement
? Her beauty has suffered, sad to say. Such tropical roses are fast to fade—” Seeing the doctor’s face, he cut himself short.

“Fleur would have known, if anyone,” he resumed in a subdued tone, “had Nanon appeared here. One must suppose that she did not. Choufleur
was
here, and up to his neck in all this affair, as anyone might have imagined. By my best intelligence he has fled the city with Villatte, to the camp they made ready for such an eventuality.”

The doctor nodded, hefting his baggage; his eyes were lowered to the ground.

“Well, brace up, then,” Maillart said, his heartiness ringing a little false on his own ear. “
Courage
—that camp can be reduced in fifteen minutes whenever Toussaint chooses—Villatte could hardly muster fifty men to defend it now. We’ll get to the bottom of it all in time. But now let us stable this beast of yours and look to your own nourishment.”

Next day the doctor undertook his own search, with the help of Riau, who had come into town from Habitation Bréda with Toussaint. Maillart had been over much of the same ground, and the doctor found no better answers, even with Riau inquiring at back stairs and in the servants’ quarters. No one had seen her at the Cigny house, which Choufleur had occupied up till his abrupt departure, nor at the late Sieur de Maltrot’s town house, which Choufleur had begun to restore. No trace of Nanon in any of the haunts she had frequented before her liaison with the doctor. Nor was there any sign of Paul.

At last he called at the apartment near the Place d’Armes where he and Nanon had lived for some weeks together before the town was burned. The place was now occupied by a staid mulatto family, whose matriarch was most unwilling to admit them. She feared the black face as much as the white, no doubt, for while a white
colon
might have come to reclaim the dwelling, a black officer might arrive simply to seize it . . . She answered their questions through a two-inch crack in the door. No, she had not seen such a woman. No, she’d seen no
sang-mêlé
boy.

When the door had shut, the doctor stood with his head bowed, staring down at the pitch apple tree beside the portal. On one of the fat green leaves Nanon had scratched the child’s name
Paul,
above the date of his birth. The inscription was there yet, the letters yellowed but still clear. They said pitch apple leaves held up as well as wooden tablets, maybe even stone. After a moment the doctor took out his penknife and added the family name to the leaf.
Paul Hébert.
He trimmed a corner from another leaf and put it into the snuffbox, but the gesture felt hollow to him even he performed it. And what if the pitch apple tree should be a tombstone? As he put away the knife his hand met the shard of mirror and he gripped it so hard the edges hurt his palm. He’d found it here, after a riot in the town, when Nanon’s rooms had been vandalized, her mirror smashed. So many times it had held her image . . . if only the fragment could function as a magic eye (as Riau believed it did) to show her to him now.

He felt that Riau had been watching him intently all this time, but still was surprised at the sadness—compassion, it was better said—in the other man’s face when he turned to meet it. Riau was also offering something in his right palm, a heap of the coarse salt crystals he’d gathered at the pans near Gonaives.

“Faut goûter sel, mon cher,”
he said. “You must taste the salt, and wake—she will not come back to you.”

All the streets were flowing toward the Place d’Armes, and Riau and the doctor let themselves be carried by that stream. In the center of the square, Governor-General Laveaux was revealed on a platform, presenting Toussaint Louverture to the throng of his own soldiers and the multicolored citizens of the town. In all the colony, Laveaux announced, no one was closer to him than Toussaint. No one had served himself, and France, as loyally, as skillfully; there was no one whom he trusted more. Therefore from this day forward Toussaint was proclaimed Lieutenant-Governor of Saint Domingue, and would be not only General-in-Chief but also Laveaux’s second in command in all aspects of government.

“Here is the savior of constitutional authority,” Laveaux announced in his peroration, “a Black Spartacus!—come to avenge all the outrages carried out against his race.”

At that a shout went up from the people, but throughout Laveaux’s speech Toussaint stood with his head humbly lowered. At times it seemed he might even kneel to embrace the Frenchman’s boots. But when Laveaux had concluded and the popular shout had faded to an echo, Toussaint pulled his shoulders back and grasped Laveaux’s hand and raised it high, together with his own, calling out in his most forceful voice, “After God, Laveaux!”

Sometime in the later watches of that night, Maillart woke to the noise of terrible cries. The doctor, with whom he’d shared his room, was suffering some nightmare as if he were under attack. The captain called his name and groped to wake him with his touch. Because the sky was overcast, there was no hint of light in the room, and no breeze, so the space was suffocatingly close. Maillart could see nothing, nothing at all, but the doctor, moaning, flailed an arm at him, then somehow hooked it over his neck. They were wrestling against the edge of the cot, then among the folding legs when it overturned. Maillart clawed at the doctor’s forearm, fighting for breath. He’d known his friend was stronger than he might appear, but this force seemed almost supernatural.

“Antoine,” he choked. “Antoine!”

“Annghh,” said the doctor. His grip relaxed. “What is it?”

The captain pulled free of him and delicately probed his half-crushed windpipe. “How should I know?” he said.

“Annh,” said the doctor. “What?—forgive me.”

“It’s nothing,” said the captain. As he spoke, a fresh wind carried the cloud off the moon, and a tendril of breeze came into the room with the new light. Maillart felt the anxious sweat beginning to dry and cool on his skin. The doctor righted the cot and stretched out on his back. The captain returned to his own bedding.

“Such a dream . . .” the doctor murmured. “I was in the river. You can’t imagine how deep, the water. And the trees on the bank were so huge, so ancient—they must have been there when Adam and Eve were in the garden.”

Gooseflesh broke out all over the captain’s exposed skin. The moonlight held steady and bright in the room. He turned his face to look at the doctor, who lay with his head gathered in his palm, his short beard jutting toward the ceiling.

“I was swimming,” he went on. “But it seemed my strokes did not break the water. There was moonlight everywhere as there is now. It was very cool, and calm, and leaves were floating all around me. Leaves and lilies. Then I went under. I don’t remember if I dived. But I went down, through planes and currents of leaves below, and when I passed through each of these layers, there would be more of them still further below. So very deep . . . the light of the moon followed me all the way down, because the water was wonderfully clear. It was like swimming down through time . . . Eons and eons of it.

“And then, at last, I did reach the bottom. There was a lot of silt, soft and cloudy. It didn’t seem dirty or unpleasant. The moonlight was still there and by feeling in the silt I found something made out of silver. Some instrument, a spade perhaps.” The doctor frowned. “Once I had found it, it seemed I had been looking for it all the time.

“I took it by the handle and began to rise. All that time I had been weightless, as if I were flying—have you ever flown in dreams? But the spade was heavy, and held me down.”

The doctor sat up on the edge of his cot. “For the first time, I knew I needed air,” he said. “I had not seemed to breathe before. So many of those currents of leaves were still above me.”

He held his open hands one above the other, several inches apart, and made some queer, mesmeric passes to show what he was talking about. Maillart saw the shifting currents of leaves as if they’d appeared between his fingers, so clear and sharp in the crystalline water.

“It was so beautiful,” the doctor said. “But with the weight of the spade I could not keep rising. The weight pulled me back down, knee deep in the silt.”

The doctor paused. Maillart could see his bare chest lifting with his breath. A gloss of sweat on his cheekbones. His eyes dark hoods.

“If I let the spade go, then I might float again,” he said. “I understood that, though I regretted it. I let the spade sink into the silt, and I kicked myself free of the bottom. I was coming up easily now, and it was all as beautiful as before . . .” He shook his head, letting his hands drop to his knees. “But too late. I would not have time enough to reach the surface. My lungs must open and I must breathe the water in.”

“But that was
my
dream,” Maillart blurted.

The doctor swung his legs up onto the cot and lay on his back as before.

“I mean,” the captain said, “I dreamed the same as you.”

“Yes,” said the doctor, with no sign of surprise. He was quiet for a moment, except that the captain could hear his breathing.

“But why did you wake me?” the doctor said. “I was happy.”

“You were screaming,” Maillart said.

“Yes,” said the doctor. “I suppose that’s true.”

He said no more, and presently they slept.

Fort de Joux, France September 1802

A step behind the anxious jailer, Caffarelli picked and splashed his way through the flooded third corridor, lifting his polished boots high before setting them back down in the wet, clicking his tongue with distaste. Boards had been laid to bridge the flood, but they had warped and bowed beneath the water and were useless, already rotting at the edges. It was very cold. Caffarelli held himself tight so as not to shiver, standing in the ankle-deep water while Baille took an interminable time to find the right key on his huge ring.

The door groaned inward. The next corridor, the last one, had a higher floor which was mercifully dry. Two iron-bound doors were set deeply into the wall, toward the far end of the corridor.

“Laquelle?”
Caffarelli’s voice rebounded in the narrow vault, louder than he’d intended.

Baille pointed, and swung forward the heavy ring of keys.
“Laissez-moi.”
Caffarelli closed his hand over the shank of the key Baille had selected.

The jailer, his plump face damp with anxiety, began to splutter a protest. Caffarelli silenced him with a raised forefinger.

“Yes!”
he hissed. “I will enter alone, I will remain with him, alone. You will leave us so. My orders.”

Baille subsided, and let the key ring slip. Turning his shoulder to exclude the jailer, Caffarelli fit the key to the lock and with a grinding effort turned it. The sound of the lock disengaging would certainly be audible within the cell, but Caffarelli waited. Suspense. He could practically feel Baille’s noisy, moist breathing on the back of his neck. He adjusted his cuffs and collar, pushed the door open and stepped in.

Side-lit by the red embers of his fire, the old Negro who called himself
Louverture
sat with his left arm propped on his chair back, looking up toward the door with an imperious expectancy. Caffarelli had studied him at second hand. He had pored over Toussaint’s letters, cross-examined the military officers and civilian officials who had dealt with him in the past . . . those who had survived to report the experience. He knew in advance that Toussaint was physically small, but he was still unprepared for his diminutive stature. This? Why, the man’s legs were so short his heels did not quite touch the floor. At the same time he was disconcerted by something in Toussaint’s expression which made him feel that the old Negro had overheard his muttered colloquy with Baille (although this was hardly likely, given the thickness of the door) . . . that the effect of his entrance was spoiled and the advantage had somehow shifted away from him altogether.

But Caffarelli was already proceeding according to plan, having brought his feet together neatly when he entered and made a movement of his hips and neck which faintly suggested a bow. He had already begun to speak, in his most unctuous tones: “Sir, you can surely imagine the great pleasure I feel to find myself in the presence of a man whose name is so celebrated, who has accomplished such extraordinary things . . .”

All the while these honeyed droplets purled off his tongue, Caffarelli was aware of the tumblers turning in the lock behind him as Baille muscled the key around, and around again, for the double lock. In another part of his mind, Napoleon’s instructions came back to him:
. . . you will
see Toussaint, who has caused the Minister of War to write to me that he
has important things to communicate. In speaking with him, you will
make him understand the enormity of the crime of which he has made
himself guilty by bearing arms against the Republic, and that we have considered him a rebel from the moment he published his constitution, and
that furthermore his treaty with Jamaica and England was made known to
us by the court of London; you will strive to gather everything he can tell
you of these different subjects, and also about the existence of his treasures,
and whatever political news he may have to tell you . . .
He observed Toussaint closely for any sign of reaction to the words he continued to utter, without, himself, really listening to them: “. . . and so I would be charmed to be instructed by such a man as I describe, should he be willing to honor me with his conversation . . .”

Toussaint was watching him with what seemed an indulgent smile. A yellow cloth was tied around his head, for what might have been a comic effect, if not for the man’s strange, compelling dignity. The fingers of one hand were splayed along the right side of his long jaw, pressing hard enough to indent the flesh. When Caffarelli had stopped talking, Toussaint turned to the table at his left and lit the single candle. Then he swung back in a leisurely manner toward his visitor, passing a hand across the lower part of his face as if to wipe away anything his expression might reveal.

“Of course,” he said. The voice was low, but resonant, larger than the man. “It is you who do me honor. Please sit down.”

That night Caffarelli sat in the room provided for him, composing his notes by the light of a sputtering oil lamp. At his left hand was a glass of extraordinarily sour red wine. He wished for brandy; there was none. Perhaps sugar. He sipped the wine, grimacing. Baille had told him that Toussaint sugared not only his wine but everything else he put into his mouth; the prisoner’s consumption of sugar was ruinous.

He licked the vinegarish residue from his teeth, and sighed. This mission would detain him here longer than he had anticipated. Toussaint was a maze not easily negotiated. The first interview had taken nearly all the day. Well, Caffarelli had expected the isolated captive to be eager to talk. But not that his discourse would travel in such smooth, impenetrably interlocked circles. In five hours of questioning he had learned practically nothing of use.

The wick of the lamp was of the poorest quality, so that the flame and the light fluttered constantly. Caffarelli scratched with his pen. He must unreel all the secrets from Toussaint’s mind and set them down on the paper. But for the first day, little enough to report. Toussaint had talked all around him (and Caffarelli was proud of his skill as an interrogator). His rich, low voice was pleasant to hear and, after a couple of hours, it had begun to make Caffarelli feel sleepy, in spite of the cold.

What a wretched place it was, this Fort de Joux. Though it was only September, the mountains were already heavy with snow. Probably the snowcaps never melted even in high summer. How long he must remain here only God knew.

The wick fizzled, releasing a great burst of darkness. Caffarelli froze in place, but it was absurd, absurd—he could not be frightened by the dark. A tiara of red sparks crowned the wick’s end, nothing more. Outdoors the wind was whistling.

This misfortunate castle. Set in an exterior wall was another barred cell—no more than a niche, really: three feet by three by four. Here some feudal lord had shut up his wife at the age of seventeen, having discovered her unfaithful when he returned from a Crusade or some such adventure. Baille had dutifully conducted him to this point of interest, when Caffarelli had first arrived. According to the tale, the cell was so placed as to force the girl to look out upon her lover’s corpse, which swung from a cliff on the mountain opposite. Some spikes and grommets could still be discerned with a spyglass, Baille said, but Caffarelli had not had the heart to look.

The sparks swelled and joined, a red rim on the end of the wick. Caffarelli found it difficult not to hold his breath. In that tiny cell, the unlucky wife could never have straightened her legs. The thought of her constantly curled limbs especially disturbed him. Of course people were smaller then—but certainly she could not have stood erect beneath the three-foot ceiling. Berthe de Joux had been her name. He pictured her curled like a fox in a cage, gnawing at crusts, pushing her own ordures out through the bars with her fingers. Watching the bones of her lover drop from the cliffside as gradually the ligaments gave way to rot. She had died an old woman in this confinement, but how long would it have taken for her to grow old?

The red rim yellowed, the flame expanded on the wick. As the light returned, Caffarelli forced the stale air from his lungs and drew in fresh. He concentrated on each exhalation, sweeping the morbidity from his mind. Dipping the pen into the inkwell, he continued his notations on Toussaint.
He tells the truth,
Caffarelli wrote grudgingly,
but he does not
tell all.

Next day when he entered the cell, he found Toussaint feverish, scarcely able to speak. He kept massaging the yellow kerchief tightly bound around his head, or alternately pressed another wadded yellow cloth along the line of his jaw. His imperial courtesy, already sufficiently bizarre under such circumstances, was still further distorted by his fever. Toussaint excused himself from conversation, until his illness should abate. Perhaps—no, certainly—tomorrow. Under his left hand was a hefty manuscript of his own composition, which, he declared, would answer any and all questions until he should again be able to speak for himself. Let Caffarelli take this document and read it at his leisure; for the time being, Toussaint begged to be excused.

But Caffarelli lingered. He had the thought that the fever must weaken Toussaint’s reserve. But although the old Negro babbled a few phrases, he let nothing slip. He said nothing of any import at all, other than his repeated proffer of the manuscript. After three-quarters of an hour, Caffarelli felt the touch of shame; he did not regard himself as a torturer. Besides, the manuscript tempted him. He picked it up, wished Toussaint a swift recovery, bowed and took his leave.

Throughout that day and well into the evening, he read and reread, with mounting frustration. One could not call Toussaint’s memorandum a tissue of lies. On the contrary, it was an assemblage of literal truths, artfully arranged to give false impressions. Each fact was just, and each was delicately balanced against the others to create this inverse image: Toussaint had never, not for one instant even in a thought, placed himself in rebellion against France. A good revolutionary citizen, he had never sought to be anything other than a humble and dutiful conservator of the colony for the nation he in his heart regarded as his own. The Captain-General Leclerc had presented himself in the guise of an invader. He had not troubled to properly present his orders from Napoleon to General Toussaint, who was after all in chief command of Saint Domingue at the time of Leclerc’s arrival. It was Leclerc who had forced his landing and commenced hostilities. And so on . . . and on.

As one kept reading, one was required to believe that Toussaint had resisted Leclerc’s arrival with all the forces at his disposal, had burnt towns and plantations, had poisoned wells, had fought desperate battles in which thousands were slain—without ever intending a bit of it! It was all a regrettable misunderstanding.

Preposterous. And yet, it was so seamlessly wrought. The more time Caffarelli spent among the loops and circles of Toussaint’s words, the more he seemed to hear the man’s compelling voice, pouring the concoction into his ears . . . At moments he came so close to believing that he had to leave the room and walk outside to brace himself with the bitter cold, the clear vision of sharp mountain peaks and the rectilinear walls of the castle.

What was most genuine in the memorandum was the outrage. It came in flashes, in response to the undeniable treachery of Toussaint’s arrest and to the rough, humiliating treatment he and his family had endured ever since. In this regard, there were passages which inspired Caffarelli to fellow-feeling. The outrage was perfectly sincere, and yet it was and must be founded on Toussaint’s contention that he had always been the loyal servant of France, for otherwise it would be unjustified. This link, Caffarelli suddenly perceived, was what gave the whole document its improbable credibility.

They sent me to France as naked as a worm,
Toussaint had written.
My
properties and my papers were seized; the most atrocious slanders were
broadcast about me, far and wide. Is this not to cut off someone’s legs and
then order him to walk? Is it not to cut out someone’s tongue and tell him
to speak? Is it not to bury a man alive?

All this was outrage, with no hint of self-pity. There was the point of attack. If moved to outrage, Toussaint might speak freely. More freely than otherwise. There was the opportunity . . . Caffarelli looked up at the wheels of brilliant stars in the frozen sky, then across at the cliff opposite, its dark descent from the pale snow-covered slope above it. It came to him that he was standing directly above the cell of Berthe de Joux. He shrugged the thought away; his course for the morrow was set.

In the morning he found Toussaint recovered from the worst of his fever, though he still pressed the kerchief against his jaw as though it pained him gravely. His eyes were hollow, but clear; the febrile glitter of the day before was gone.

After the opening round of courtesies, Caffarelli began as he’d planned, theatrically. He slammed the manuscript on the table. It is all nonsense, he declaimed, raising his voice to resound in the close space. All deception—and useless too. For the evident truth is that you expelled from Saint Domingue all agents of the French government save those who might furnish you with the external façade of continued obedience. That you raised a great army of soldiers who were all devoutly loyal to yourself alone, and flocks of civil servants who owed their devotion only to you.

All the while he was speaking, Caffarelli looked forcefully into Toussaint’s eyes, meaning to stare him down, but the black man did not quail or recoil or react in any way at all. In a perfectly balanced stillness, Toussaint merely observed. Caffarelli was obliged to shift his gaze to the drizzling stone wall behind him. You put the entire island in a state of defense; you dealt secretly with the English; finally you proclaimed a constitution and put it into effect before you sent it to the French government for approval—a constitution which names you governor for life! And this—he bashed the manuscript with the flat of his hand—has no bearing whatsoever on any of those facts I have just mentioned. But these are the facts which we must discuss. I ask you, what have you to say?