Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? (14 page)

“Me, Dr. Jean Pinceau, I was accused of sexually abusing Celanire, my adopted daughter. Melody, my faithful Melody, was a witness for the prosecution. Alarmed by the child's behavior of crying for no reason and losing her appetite, she described how she had plied Celanire with questions. After weeks of her insisting, the child ended up telling her the truth. Encouraged by Melody, Celanire finally went and revealed everything to the police. When I heard Melody churn out all that nonsense, I got the impression I was dreaming. Worst of all, the jury believed every word of it!

“My trial lasted over a year. I became a cause célèbre, the subject of conversation of every bourgeois and country yokel, every white, black, and mulatto. If you read the papers from Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guiana for the year 1894, I made front-page news. Few of the columnists called me a common pedophile. Instead, they reported my career record: brilliant student in France, successful medical experiments, an antidrug crusade, and unmatched devotion to my patients. Ah! Dieudonné was a loyal friend during these tough times!

“Because of me, he left the police force, became the head of my defense committee, and had petition upon petition circulated. But it wasn't easy for him. Because of the color of my skin! As a mulatto, I'm too light-skinned. The masses would have mobilized for a black. Nobody felt like defending a guy whose class is traditionally an ally of the white Creoles. Dieudonné adamantly repeated that I was not being sentenced for rape, which was a ridiculous accusation for anyone in his right senses. Who was this Melody whose testimony was so damning? A real mystery. Before she worked for me, no decent family had hired her. Nobody on Grande-Terre or Basse-Terre had ever set eyes on her. What I was paying for, Dieudonné asserted, was my nationalistic stand. During the last electoral campaign I had openly canvassed for the end of French tutelage. Poor guy, he did what he could. He had no idea that at meetings the presence and encouragements of a cheering crowd has the effect of a rum punch, and you say anything that comes into your head. At heart, I've always been a bourgeois, a small-time bourgeois.

“My family didn't want her, as you can imagine; they were scared of her. So the court entrusted Celanire to the sisters of Saint-Joseph-de-Cluny, who sent her to the Sisters of Charity in Paris for her education.

“After I was sentenced, I was transferred to Grande-Terre. From Grande-Anse a prison cart took me to Petit-Bourg, where, shackled hand and foot, I embarked on the sailboat linking the town with La Pointe. Along the Lardenoy wharf Dieudonné had managed to muster a few demonstrators shouting ‘Free Pinceau!' But most people had come out of curiosity to gaze at the likes of a future convict. There were a good many high-society ladies under their lace parasols who looked me up and down. The jail at La Pointe was the most revolting place you could imagine. Obviously it was nothing compared to what we saw in the penal colony, but believe me, it wasn't a pretty sight. It was the first circle of hell. This is the last. The prisoners were piled in eight or ten to a cell, where in the dark the mosquitoes had the feast of their lives. Once a day the guards gave them a ration of green bananas. Once a month they were lined up in the yard, given a piece of rough soap, and hosed down. The rest of the time they fought as best they could not only with the mosquitoes, but also with the rats attracted by all this filth. No need to tell you that with so much diarrhea, the holes for doing your business were filled to overflowing. I can't begin to describe the stench! Oddly enough, in the high-security area we were slightly better off—only four individuals to a cell. I found myself with a Chinese guy who had hacked a woman to pieces, a black who had raped his sixty-year-old mother before slitting her open, and an Indian who had sent his father's head flying with one swipe of a cutlass. In the evening all these poor devils wept like little children. All shouted they were innocent and gave their own version of their story. They then sodomized each other by way of consolation. Nobody could escape it. I even ended up rather liking it.

“On Christmas Day, 1895, I sailed on the
Biskra
for Guiana in a raging sea. All around me my traveling companions were vomiting left, right, and center. Although I had never been known for aggressive or disruptive behavior, they locked me up in a blazing hot cell, one they reserved for violent prisoners, right above the boilers. Throughout the entire voyage I was unable to stand upright, which explains why to this very day I walk hunched over, bent in two. On arrival they began by thrashing me, considering it arrogant on my part to ask to be transferred to the camp at Saint-Louis to treat the lepers. They didn't understand I felt like a leper myself. Birds of a feather flock together.”

“So you haven't heard from Celanire since she was a child? You've no idea what became of her once she left Guadeloupe?”

“No. The last time I saw her was at the courthouse in Grande-Anse with Melody, when her mouth uttered those outrageous things which everyone took to be gospel truth. Even I was troubled by what she said. I began to wonder whether my sex, which has always had a mind of its own, had not won the better of me. Perhaps unknowingly I had gone up to her room and committed the horrors she accused me of. After all, how could an innocent mind invent such terrible things? Where would she have got such ideas? What Satan had put them in her head? Then I regained my senses. I was innocent. Celanire must be twenty-four or twenty-five by now. I imagine she is capable of driving the most serious, the most virtuous, guy out of his mind. I am positive she continues her mischief making, and I tell myself I am somewhat to blame. If I could have loved her, if, when Ofusan died, I had been there for her, treated her like my daughter, it might have curbed her wicked instincts. At the end of the day, perhaps all she needed was a little love from me.”

“Unfortunately,” murmured Hakim, “you couldn't be closer to the truth. I have met her, your Celanire. Far, far from here. In Bingerville, in deepest Africa. It's her, it's the same person you're describing, there's no mistake about it. Her beauty you've described so vividly, her black-black skin, her long, oiled hair, the terrible scar around her neck, especially that scar. You can't forget that scar once you've seen it. It haunts you. It must be terrible for her not to be able to get rid of it. It's funny, Celanire talked about you all the time in the most affectionate terms. ‘Darling little Papa' here and ‘darling little Papa' there. She claimed you were dead, and she had never managed to get over it. She also described her island of Guadeloupe, which, in her eyes, was the most perfect place on earth. She swore she would return there one day to clear up some unfinished business. I dread to think what exactly, since she wreaks evil wherever she goes. I know for sure, without being able to prove it, that she is the cause of my suffering. It's her and nobody else who has brought down misfortune on my head. Tonight, my friend, I'll tell you my story, and you can judge for yourself.”

 

For in fact the sun had risen, brightening the sky, a patch of crumpled cloth above the eternally muddy sea. Papa Doc had needed the entire night to unravel his sad story. Since the Galibi woman had already left to sell her wares at the market he set about heating up some watery coffee, which he poured out equally into tin mugs. The two men dunked their pieces of cassava, drank, and ate, both locked in identical thoughts. How amazing life is! There they were, side by side, sharing the same fate, victims of the same Celanire! Each of them had been born and had lived on opposite sides of the world, one in the Americas, the other in deepest Africa. Each of them had been separated by so many lands, oceans, and mountains! Did it mean they were going to die together? What nature of spirit was driving their common enemy? Why was she bent on doing evil from sunrise to sunset, from north to south? What caused her rage? What did she want to destroy in the world? Reluctantly, Hakim set off for Monsieur Thénia's house. Out of the two, he was perhaps the more shaken. In dismay he realized he wouldn't be able to tell his story before nightfall, and he felt something he had not felt for a very long time. Certainly not since he had been in Cayenne, where he lived as if in a daze. In fact he got the impression he had been born in this patch of forest and that the memory of what he had left behind had been erased from his mind. Had he ever been anything else but one of life's rejects, thrown into the last circle of hell? That morning, his memory returned, and with it, the memory of the terrible injustice he had been a victim of. Abandoned by his father. Spurned by his family. Rejected by society. But suddenly another thought crossed his mind, interrupting his litany of woes. What if, like Papa Doc, he was paying for a crime unbeknown to him? Hakim had seldom thought of himself as a pervert. Fondling Bokar had not left him with a feeling of guilt. On the contrary, it had given two lonely, tortured teenagers a taste of happiness. Simply the death of his beloved had convinced him that because of something
abnormal about him he was never meant to be happy. For the first time, he realized he was a degenerate who deserved the most terrible punishment.

In the past the promontory at Saint-François was known for its unhealthy vapors, rising up from the white and black mangrove trees soaking in the brackish, snake-infested waters, and capable of causing deadly diseases. Then some convicts had cleaned up the area and built dwellings for the notability. Monsieur Thénia's house was the most remarkable of them all. As a safeguard against the risk of fire, the governor of the bank had shipped a metal framework from Bordeaux. The building's slender columns and its numerous apertures gave it an impression of airiness. But people did not just admire the zinc friezes, the scrolled consoles made of iron, or the elaborate balustrades. They went into raptures over the gardens. Hakim, who had under his orders a horde of gardeners, the ‘banished,' as the convicts were called, simply common-law criminals but paradoxically the most dangerous type, had them hoe, weed, rake, and graft until they were ready to give up the ghost. He had invented an irrigation system of pulleys and paddle wheels. In his new frame of mind he realized that morning that unconsciously he had taken as inspiration the gardens at the Home for Half-Castes in Bingerville. The bamboo grove, the hibiscus hedges, the clumps of crotons, the beds of periwinkles, the English lawn, and the aviary where all sorts of nocturnal and diurnal butterflies, as striking as those in the Ivory Coast, beat their powdery wings—nothing was missing.

He now understood that his entire past was embedded deep inside him. Nothing had been exorcized. Bingerville and the never-ending rainy season. Koffi Ndizi. Thomas de Brabant. Betti Bouah. Every one of these ghosts was alive and well and living inside him. Papa Doc's story had opened the door of their jail, and now, liberated, they were prowling around him.

Among his team of gardeners were three Arab convicts, Mimoun, Rachid, and Ahmed, who were serving a sentence for peccadillos committed in their
bled
. They spoke to no one, didn't mix with either black or white, and all the convicts knew they only had intercourse among themselves. When he approached them, Hakim was aware of something being triggered inside him. He realized his old passions were not dead. He looked the three men straight in the face. Blackened by the sun, as angular as a vine stem, tattooed from top to bottom, Mimoun was certainly the handsomest. Trembling with a secret emotion, Hakim assigned him his day's work. Mimoun listened to him without saying a word, walked away, then, turning to his companions, said a few words in their gravelly, hermetic language and all three of them burst out laughing.

Hakim hung his head. Mimoun had seen through him. No, he hadn't changed. He would never be cured of what he carried inside him. He would never be anything else but what he was.

He had such a reputation as an expert gardener that in the afternoons Monsieur Thénia lent him to the colonial administration to weed the public squares and plant jasmine and mignonette. On his way to the town center each day he would meet processions of escaped convicts, their numbered prison uniforms in tatters, returning to the fold at gunpoint. The dream of escape was the convict's obsession. The idée fixe was freedom. Although the men knew only too well that the end of the line would be Charvein or the Ile Saint-Joseph for life, they never gave up trying. There was the story of a convict who had escaped twenty-four times, had been recaptured twenty-four times, and on his last trip to his cell slit his belly open with a cutlass. Since Hakim no longer had any dreams, he had never tried to escape. When he was at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni he had been told about the gold that lay hidden upriver. Boats loaded with gold diggers on their way upstream would pass the convict vessels. It was said that the gold formed in the heart of the Tumuc Humac Mountains, then the rainwater washed it down along the riverbeds, where it glittered supreme, the object of the gold diggers' lust. So sometimes he pictured himself as a marauder, scraping the sand and the gravel, pocketing his gold nugget. Yet what would be the point? Even if he managed to sell it, what would he do with the money?

When the eye of the sun began to droop low in the sky, Hakim hurried to go and join Papa Doc. All he wanted was to start telling his tale; he wanted it to be his turn to tell his story, which he now saw in a different light. He was cursed before he was born because of those wicked instincts planted inside him. When he arrived at the shack, the Galibi woman, her hands reddened with blood, was busy scaling a skewer of grouper fish. Crouching a few steps away, a Saramaka, as tall as a
mapoo,
a bow and arrows slung on his side, holding a cutlass, was waiting for Papa Doc. The latter no sooner appeared than the Saramaka leapt to his feet. The two men embraced like old acquaintances. Then the Saramaka began to explain in his grating, incomprehensible (at least to Hakim) tongue that he had traveled all this way because a terrible epidemic was ravaging his village. Countless villagers were being carried off. Men, women, and children were burning with fever and bleeding to death through every orifice. Papa Doc nodded. It sounded very much like hemorrhaging dengue fever, which he had successfully treated in the past at Grande-Anse. While he was quickly collecting together his vials and unguents, Hakim was seized by an irresistible compulsion. To hell with Monsieur Thénia's garden: he would follow the two men, even though he knew full well that any unjustified absence was immediately reported to the penitentiary administration. The price he would have to pay for absconding might very well be landing up again on the Ile Royale.