The Belle Créole

Maryse Condé, Nicole Simek

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780813944210
• eBook ISBN: 9780813944234
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Condé added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The twelfth novel by this celebrated author revolves around an enigmatic crime and the young man at its center. Dieudonné Sabrina, a gardener, aged twenty-two and black, is accused of murdering his employer--and lover--Loraine, a wealthy white woman descended from plantation owners. His only refuge is a sailboat, La Belle Créole, a relic of times gone by. Condé follows Dieudonné's desperate wanderings through the city of Port-Mahault the night of his acquittal, the narrative unfolding through a series of multivoiced flashbacks set against a forbidding backdrop of social disintegration and tumultuous labor strikes in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Guadeloupe. Twenty-four hours later, Dieudonné's fate becomes suggestively intertwined with that of the French island itself, though the future of both remains uncertain in the end.

Echoes of Faulkner and Lawrence, and even Shakespeare's Othello, resonate in this tale, yet the drama's uniquely modern dynamics set it apart from any model in its exploration of love and hate, politics and stereotype, and the attempt to find connections with others across barriers. Through her vividly and intimately drawn characters, Condé paints a rich portrait of a contemporary society grappling with the heritage of slavery, racism, and colonization.

Night

9

“How did you find me?”

“It wasn’t hard. I went to Radio Solèye Lévé. I asked where you were living.”

“Did anyone recognize you?”

“I don’t know . . . Yes. Maybe.”

Boris was bothered and wasn’t hiding it well. He inspected the surroundings. Nothing noticeable to report. The dark sky was running low over the rooftops. The Grands Hommes complex was located in a densely populated neighborhood, a mosaic of four-story buildings and modest villas so alike you could mistake one for the other behind their small gardens of hibiscus, bougainvillea, and crotons, where everyone was too busy surviving to spare a glance at what their neighbors were doing. Rather, they had to take advantage of the last remaining hours of electricity before darkness settled in, sovereign and impenetrable. In haste, the women were snatching up what was left in the convenience store. On a makeshift sports field, dodging the piles of trash as best they could, youngsters were kicking balls around. The very rare few who owned generators were rushing home to watch CNN. Just when he was about to make his master stroke, Boris should be avoiding any association with an ex-convict. At the same time, his friendship surged back into his heart like a freshwater tide. He had forgotten how young Dieudonné was, thinner and more vulnerable now after his eighteen months in the shadows. More gently, he said, “Listen, Benjy and I are in a meeting with colleagues. You can wait for me in the guest room . . .”

He added, a little ashamed, “Don’t show yourself. It’s better that way.”

He moved aside, opened the gate he had up to that point kept shut, and with a kick, pushed away Prince, his creole mutt who was skulking around. If Dieudonné had been expecting a warmer welcome, he didn’t show his disappointment. Walking one behind the other in the narrow hallway dividing the villa in two, they nearly ran into Benjy’s big belly as he was coming out of the toilet zipping up his fly. Recognizing Dieudonné, he scrutinized him with curiosity. But the other paid no more attention to him than he would to a stranger. However, he couldn’t have forgotten Benjy, whose traits stuck in your memory once you took a look at him. Picture a black man built like a pièce d’Inde of old, a prime slave, with a mask under his shaved skull that would not have looked out of place on a Roman emperor. Journalists scrambling for inspiration called him Caesar Augustus, a nickname that didn’t fit his personality at all. He was a gentle man at heart, hesitant and timorous. He elbowed Boris.

“I remember his nice face. You wouldn’t know what he is by the way he looks.”

Boris replied mockingly, “What is he? Serbulon repeated it plenty, he’s a victim.”

Then he felt bad for being sarcastic.

Around them, the discussions weren’t making much headway. Not without difficulty, Boris had convinced Benjy to undertake a historic action. He should meet the leaders of the PPRP without delay and propose a merger with the PTCR in order to create a new party, the PPSN, which, bolstered by the ranks of the trade unionists, would lead the country toward lendépendans. Across the island, from the North to the South, people’s minds were ripe and just waiting for that. The PPRP had not rejected the offer to meet. However, from the start of the deliberations, it was clear that its delegation of hardened fifty-somethings, deserters from the Algerian War, ex-tenants of the high-security Fresnes prison, felt only contempt for Benjy and his troops. It was led by one of its founders, Roméo Serrutin, a professor of constitutional law at the university whom everyone called “The Elder” in African fashion. Roméo Serrutin was showing off. He had conveniently forgotten that, two years away from retirement, some cleaning ladies had walked in on him with a female student on the floor of his office, engaged in an act whose nature left no room for doubt. At the time, he had bragged that this attested to his virility. Now, his mouth was frowning strictly: what did these PTCR youngsters have to brag about? Of having organized strikes without any clearly defined goal that, consequently, were ineffective and only served to inconvenience the population! They were so unsure of themselves that they hadn’t dared launch a general strike, the wake-up call that management took most seriously. Even if they succeeded in hauling the country out of the muddy rut it was stuck in, no one should forget that it had happened, first of all, thanks to the efforts of the PPRP.

The door opened. In came the Angel Carla, as Boris had nicknamed her because she liked to wear blue and, with her flutter of blonde hair, looked just like the Gabriel in an Annunciation painting whose name, unbeliever that he was, he had forgotten. She brought cans of Coca-Cola, ice cubes, miraculously, and ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Some of the PPRP dinosaurs were tempted to tell her in no uncertain terms that she was making a mockery of them and that she should bring them more manly drinks, some CRSs for example—citrus, rum, and sugar—but something held them back. Carla’s movements were so gracious that, in her magician’s hands, paper napkins changed into woodpigeons, turtledoves, and white rabbits. Each time Boris looked at this companion that the Good Lord had sent him to transform the desert of his life, he couldn’t get over his happiness. He recalled his stupor when he had realized that this talented journalist was in love and, because of him, was thinking of settling in a small, fitful, and remote country. So he still had appeal, then? He who possessed nothing? He who at fifty was practically an old man, with his flabby body and the onset of osteoarthritis? Since he had started living with Carla, her sweetness and constant admiration had brought his heartbeat back to life. She had already translated his poems into Italian and had sent them by FedEx to Lavoro Editions in Milan. The only thing she still needed to do to reach the seventh heaven of perfection was to learn Creole, which would shut the grumblers up. A sign that the Good Lord blessed their union was that a fruit was ripening in her loins and her stomach was growing round as a gourd. Because of all this, Boris, completely unconcerned about contradicting himself, had disavowed the misogynistic verses he had written in the wake of his conjugal misadventure. Yes, tradition and Joseph Zobel got it right: a woman can take a guy to heaven or plunge him into the depths of hell. The trouble is that modern women, poto mitan pillars of old, formerly mothers and servants for their men, tigresses for their brood, had forgotten the ancestral virtues. Liberation had gone to their heads like an adulterated wine. They cared only about their careers now, or financial gain.

When everyone had finished the sandwiches, Roméo Serrutin pointed out that it was almost ten o’clock, which meant that in a few minutes, the electricity fairy was going to take leave of the inhabitants of the Grands Hommes complex. She would fly off to the other end of the city and with a wave of her magic wand she’d light up the Fleurie complex where he lived. He was proposing, then, that everyone meet up there in an hour. In reality, this was just a flimsy pretext for bringing the debate back to the PPRP’s territory. When Benjy and Boris were alone again, Boris suggested, “What if we send him to Cuba?”

“To Cuba? What an idea!” grumbled Benjy, whose mind was already on other things.

Boris armed himself with patience and explained, in a tone he would use with a child, “The Cubans always take three of our youths to train them as health workers, and two others for training in agriculture. He was a gardener, that might suit him.”

Since Benjy didn’t seem too convinced, Boris laid out in detail the merits of such a deal. It wasn’t only that this solution would resolve the question of Dieudonné’s future. It would be great publicity for the PTCR if it took this boy in hand, a boy who in the public’s eyes had just had a brush with perdition, and reformed him into a socialist youth! They would score points with all the unions and rival parties.

Benjy was still hesitating when, without warning, the electricity disappeared.

Boris quickly lit a camping lantern, and, followed by Benjy’s shuffling feet, returned to Dieudonné. Motionless, the latter seemed to be floating in the lake of shadows lapping every nook and cranny of the room. Boris took a seat next to him and, with his usual loquacity, set himself the challenge of charming him. He went through the whole list. The barbudos, the Sierra Maestra, the victorious revolution, the friendship between Fidel and Che, avatars of Achilles and Patroclus, their political differences, Che’s departure, his final battle in the Quebrada del Churo and La Higuera deep in the south of Bolivia, his elimination. He waxed sorrowful over the moment when the most illustrious citizen of the great Latin American homeland fell, under the barrage of a common sergeant drunk on chicha. Dieudonné did not really seem interested in this story. When Boris finished, he declared, “I would rather have gone to Jamaica!”

Boris was undeterred. “No, no, no! Jamaica is like here. Even worse, violence and drugs. What you need is structure and discipline, and, especially, to learn a trade.”

Dieudonné asked a question, but his flat voice betrayed not the least bit of enthusiasm. “When do I have to leave?”

Boris looked at Benjy, who wasn’t saying anything and seemed bored, and asserted, “Very soon. We’ll take care of your documents for you.”

Without a word of thanks, Dieudonné inquired, “Can I sleep here?”

Boris reluctantly agreed.

The two men came back to the living room and Benjy repeated, as if he didn’t know how to say anything else, “I remember he always seemed like a good guy!”

Deep inside, Benjy was troubled. Once again following Boris’s advice, he had not informed the PTCR’s executive committee of his meeting with the PPRP and he wondered whether he wasn’t committing an abuse of power. And also, he noticed that the dinosaurs of the PPRP, despite their fifty years of failures and setbacks, had not learned humility. They took it upon themselves to lecture everyone and thought they held the truth. They pretended not to know that lendépendans scared everyone in the country. He himself couldn’t shake the question: lendépendans, to what end? If they ever reached this Desirada, the sun would still rise on the same side of the world. The needy and the well-to-do would still be among us, as would the blessed and the cursed, the prosperous and the empty-handed. The procession of the destitute would still be lined up outside the door to happiness, waiting in vain for it to open. Everybody wants to change the world. The world doesn’t change. In disbelief, he heard Boris rehashing his arguments. This merger would be an opportunity. Thanks to it, they would galvanize the patriot side and rekindle the flame of years past.

Boris escorted Benjy back to his car and listened to the grievances of the guards, who were having trouble holding back their watchdogs built like young bulls. Last night, once again, a commando had tried to attack the convenience store, even though its shelves were depleted. What did they think they’d find? Not a single merchant kept any change in the registers anymore. Good Lord, how was this all going to turn out? Around them, the neighborhood had become a gaping hole of darkness, as everyone barricaded themselves from their fears as best they could. In the streets, in the small yards, not a single sign of life. Nothing was moving, apart from the dogs fighting over the sparse tidbits they could find in the trash and the brazen cats running after romance, come what may. Boris considered talking to Dieudonné again, then abandoned the idea. There would be time enough tomorrow to give him a sermon on the meaning of life, the virtues of work, and the future of socialism. First he had to calm Carla down, who was now at term, and persuade her to accept that he wouldn’t be back anytime soon. The meeting with the PPRP was of the utmost importance. The Angel Carla wasn’t sleeping. She had lit a candle and was sitting on her bed, her hands clasped nervously over her stomach. For a second, he thought her first contractions had started. She shook her head, then asked him in her careful French, “You aren’t going to leave me alone with him are you, in the middle of the night?”

He shrugged his shoulders and asked casually, “What are you afraid of?”

Without responding directly to his question, she rebelled. “Why doesn’t he stay somewhere else? At his mother’s!”

“Serbulon repeated it a million times, he doesn’t have a mother.”

“At his grandmother’s, then!”

To pacify her, he tried to wrap his arms around her, but she resisted, hammering home grandiloquently, “Listen, Boris. It’s him or me. If he stays here, I’m the one who’s leaving.”

He made the mistake of letting out a snort of laughter, teasing despite himself, “And where, may I ask, will you go?”

At that, she burst into loud sobs, pitiful sobs that betrayed her fear but even more so a deeper malaise that was suddenly revealed to him: a feeling of loneliness, of abandonment in this country where no one was like her. He was floored. He had thought she was happy, successfully transplanted, at ease in her surroundings. He understood now that this was just an appearance, a facade. After a minute, her cries got more and more raspy and desperate, leaving him no choice. He got up.

Dieudonné still hadn’t moved, motionless in the dark. Boris lifted the lantern high, all the while stammering excuses having to do with the character of women, especially if they were pregnant. Yes, afraid so! That sex is weak, pusillanimous even. At first, Dieudonné stared at him with his bottomless eyes, as if he didn’t understand. Then, a flicker of rage set them ablaze and frightened Boris. Could the boy actually be armed? He was mistaken; the flicker went out as fast as it had caught. Dieudonné got up, headed for the living room, and opened the front door. The animal of night swallowed him up in its jaws.

Ashamed, Boris went back to the bedroom where Carla had been listening. Despite her halo of curly hair and her blue eyes, she didn’t seem like an angel to him at all anymore. He addressed her sharply. “He’s gone. Are you happy now? Because of you, I put him out like a dog. Like a dog.”

He slammed the door shut on his way out.

It was their first quarrel.

10

Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot,

Prête-moi ta plume, pour écrire un mot!

The night vomited up its India ink in a great gush. The mangrove is a jablesse, a witch with kinky hair steeping and stewing her ouabain poisons. Her hut is hidden in a tangle of tree roots. This is where she plans her heinous crimes. In the foredawn, wearing water serpents for anklets and leeches for earrings, she casts off to cast her spells and the cadaver count swells. In her wake stretches a trail of bones, as white as Hop o’ my Thumb’s pebbles.

Qui veut voir ma lanterne des magies pour deux noix?

Dieudonné was afraid and, to muster his courage, was reciting nursery rhymes. One of his earliest memories was of a December 24th, when he was five years old. Marine had sung carols with the chorus of neighbors and had then gone down to the Sainte-Hyacinthe Church to attend midnight Mass, leaving him asleep alone on his kabann. About a half hour past midnight, he woke up, startled to find himself adrift on this raft in the darkness, deprived of the protective body that was always stretched out beside him. With great difficulty, he had set foot on the floor and explored the immensity of the cabin. In the other room, Marine had taken care to leave the nightlight lit. Unfortunately, the voracious wick had drunk up all the oil and, rushing in from without, the animal of night had come crawling, crawling under the door. She had gotten in. She had swallowed up the chairs, the table, and the kitchen cart, and devoured the devotional images on the walls. She was circling, threatening from all sides. Terrified, Dieudonné had climbed back up on the bed where Marine had found him an hour later, like a castaway on his island, screaming at the top of his lungs. It had taken her days to get over it, hugging her beloved tight enough to smother him and repeating, “Good Lord, Good Lord, my child could have died of fright! Of fright!”

Not a single car on this stretch of highway. He started running and his footsteps echoed in the silence. He wasn’t upset with Boris and wasn’t angry at him, having understood right off the bat that this was no longer the man he knew. The poet in rags and dreadlocks had nothing in common with this person, his skull shaved close like Benjy’s, his neck trapped in a military pea coat. This new Boris had even grown pot-bellied. How sad to end one’s days a politician!

Bitterness, anger. Generally, Dieudonné’s heart didn’t experience these types of feelings. Only one time had he engaged in an act of violence, and see where it got him! In the secrecy of his heart, Dieudonné relived this story he had never confided to anyone. It was the night before Christmas Eve. For two days, leaving her computer off, Loraine had been scribbling addresses on envelopes in the old-fashioned way. A thousand other signs—telephone conversations with caterers, a ballet of delivery trucks dropping off flowers, table linens, glasses, and dishes, Amabelle putting in overtime—had heralded Loraine’s intention to hold a sumptuous Christmas Eve dinner. Was it in Luc’s honor that she, who never spent time with anyone, was breaking out of her routine? One morning while he was filling the lawn mower with gas, Loraine had approached him. Avoiding his eyes, she had held out a fistful of bills.

“This is for you!”

Not understanding, he had stood up. So, waving the money around, she had mumbled some quick, incomprehensible words in her chaotic way. Since he still didn’t get it and kept standing there in front of her, she had articulated more clearly, with exasperation, “Don’t give me that goggle-eyed look, like a fried big-jack. It’s Christmas for everyone. I’m giving you a few days off. Go have fun.”

Where? Where did she want him to go? He had stammered out that she knew he didn’t have any relatives who cared about him, or any friends, and so had nowhere to go. Then she had started screaming furiously, as if his words, forcing her to take the measure of her own cruelty, were enraging her. “I don’t give a damn! In any case, get lost. I don’t want to see you around here tomorrow or next week.”

The door had slammed shut behind her. Sick with outrage, Dieudonné wiped his hands and lay down on the bench in the garage. At two o’clock in the afternoon, the heat was suffocating. Rays ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Translator’s Acknowledgments
• Afternoon
• Dusk
• Night
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Afterword, by Dawn Fulton
• Bibliography