Chapter Seven
ISABELLE CIGNY WAS beyond delicate, she was bone-thin, as frail as a consumptive, though she lacked the consumptive’s inwardly gnawed appearance, and her bright animation did not seem feverish to Doctor Hébert’s eye. If she stood in the center of her drawing room, twirled to spin out her skirts from the waist in a spiral of silk taffeta, she looked lissome, willowy, though in truth she had no height. It seemed that one could lift her with one hand, and no doubt there were those who would have liked to try it, for Isabelle was a pretty thing, with a weight of dark hair that looked too heavy for her slender neck, and skin whose icy pallor colored quickly whenever she was stirred.
She appeared very young, and certainly she must be younger than her husband. The doctor had waited upon Madame Cigny four times running and failed to find her at home, and at last had called upon Monsieur Cigny at his place of business. Cigny was a burly man in his fifties, beginning to run to fat, who wore a bushy untrimmed beard like an apron over his chest. He received the doctor courteously enough, but the mention of Thibodet brought only a black look, and he could report nothing of Elise beyond acknowledging the acquaintance. Doctor Hébert drew the impression that Monsieur Cigny and his wife moved in fairly separate social circles. At any rate, he had been able to learn at what hours he would most probably find the lady of the house at home.
Two gentlemen were already seated in her parlor when the doctor was admitted. He paid his compliments, which she accepted rather casually, and took a seat at the edge of the room, near a window. A youth dressed in the uniform of the Regiment Le Cap sat near Madame Cigny, on an ottoman, fixing upon her a doglike concentrated look. He seemed inordinately fascinated by her white-stockinged foot, from which she dangled a satin shoe with a blue bow. Each time it looked about to drop, he started forward to retrieve it, but always at the last moment she twitched it back against her sole, so that he sat back crestfallen, under her teasing sidelong glance. Meanwhile she gave more of her attention to the second young man, who sat beside her on the sofa, dressed in the costume of a Paris dandy, cream-colored gilet and striped silk redingote. She was reading, or pretending to read, a book whose latter pages were uncut, and whenever she turned over a packet of unopened leaves she presented it to this gentleman, who with a wriggle and a simper used a paper knife to slit it.
The doctor sat somewhat uncomfortably, both feet flat on the floor, on a chair which was rather too small for him. All the furniture in the room looked as if it had come from France, probably packed in hogsheads of straw, given its fragility. A servant in ornate livery came in and served him coffee. Desultorily he sipped, his glance wandering around the room. The cup he’d been given was eggshell-thin, banded with gold around the rim. He thought that Madame Cigny had forgotten he was there, but presently she tossed aside her book and crossed the room to where he sat. So small she was that he was almost eye to eye with her when she stopped before him. Her eyes were large and luminous, quite dark, and certainly she was very pretty when she smiled.
“Give me your news of Elise,” she said brightly.
The doctor cast about for somewhere to lay down his cup and saucer, but there was no table near. “My news,” he said. “Well, I had rather hoped to hear something from you.”
“Oh, she is naughty,” said Isabelle Cigny, and tapped him teasingly on the wrist. “She does not write to her brother.”
The cup and saucer rattled in the doctor’s hand. Madame Cigny signaled the slave to come and remove the utensils.
“I—” The doctor swallowed, looking over at the young officer and the dandy, who were eyeing each other across the abandoned book as if they might dispute its possession. The topic was awkward enough without an audience. Isabelle Cigny turned, gaily fanning out her skirt. One of her hands rested on her waist; one of his own might have encircled it.
“Henri, Pascal, do leave us, please,” she said.
The dandy hopped to his feet, with an expression that suggested protest, but Madame Cigny raised her voice slightly before he could speak.
“Oh, don’t be tiresome,” she said, a shade of acerbity in her twitter. “It is not discreet.”
The two gentlemen made their departure then, and as they passed through the door, the servant returned to serve fresh coffee, then withdrew to stand against the wall, his arms folded across his frogged coat. Madame Cigny took a seat beside the doctor and helped him to some sugar.
“I do not take them seriously, you understand,” she said, nodding toward the door. “Only it can be tedious here sometimes. The days are long, and hot of course, as you will surely have noticed.”
“It is a beautiful country,” said the doctor, touching a film of sweat from his upper lip with his handkerchief.
“I was educated in France,” said Madame Cigny. “After my marriage, we might have remained there for all of me—you know my husband is not a Creole—but he thought it better to come here so as to look after my interests.” She smiled. “And his own, naturally.”
The doctor was a little startled by this candor, but perhaps she had noticed his unease, and meant to make him an invitation to confidence. He might as well assume so, it occurred to him.
“I will be frank, madame.” With some concentration he avoided looking at the slave who posed against the wall, having learned that the Creole sense of discretion did not extend to blacks. “I have no news of my sister whatever, I have not even seen her since I came out from France, I have only lately learned that she has borne a child—if it is true.”
“Oh, the dear little Sophie, yes, she is quite genuine,” Madame Cigny said. “I believe they quarreled over that, Elise and that regrettable husband of hers.”
“Pardon?” said the doctor. “Did Thibodet wish so badly for a son?”
“Oh, it was not that at all!” Madame Cigny flicked him again on the wrist, got up and strolled away from him, along the row of windows. “No, it was…il lui semblait qu’elle avait une touche de la brosse, la petite—comme on dirait ici. Since she was so dark when she was born, and both the parents fair.”
The doctor watched her back. She turned abruptly and a stream of sunlight flooded her eyes; he saw that they were not black as he had thought, but the deepest blue. She beckoned to the servant, who came over and partially lowered the blinds.
“Of course there was nothing in that,” Madame Cigny said. “Only that Thibodet was an idiot—they had other differences, before. I’m sure the child takes after some grandparent. Besides, her hair is good.” She seated herself and once more tapped him on the wrist. “Of course one hears the most extraordinary stories. In Paris I knew the wife of a Polish officer who gave birth to a perfect little Negro—she put it down to being startled by a black coachman while she was enceinte.” She sparkled at him, then turned to peer through the slats of the blind. “That explanation wouldn’t wear well here,” she said. “It would become rather too universal, do you not agree? And all our children would be black. But stay, you must meet mine.”
She sent the servant out, and presently in came a black nurse, carrying an infant in her arms and leading a little boy along by the hand.
Madame Cigny rushed to take the baby. “Hélo?se,” she said, holding her so that the doctor might see, “et mon petit Robert.” She cradled the baby into her bodice and laid her hand on the boy’s head. The infant Hélo?se waved her small pink hands in her mother’s face, and Madame Cigny began to croon to her. The doctor stood.
“Why, how handsome they are.” He stooped and offered his hand to Robert, who clutched a pleat of his mother’s skirt and drew it in front of himself. The doctor peeked at the face of Hélo?se and realized she must be scarcely three months old.
“They’re close in age, your niece and Hélo?se,” Madame Cigny said, as if she had read his thought. No doubt that she was stronger than she seemed, the doctor mused, and maybe deeper too; she looked as if childbirth would kill her. She gave the infant a series of quick pecking kisses and passed her back to the nurse. Immediately Hélo?se began to cry, but the nurse took her to a seat in a corner and hushed her with the breast.
Madame Cigny detached Robert’s hand from her skirt and curled herself on the sofa, shifting the book to the table. The doctor lowered himself into a chair adjacent, and she turned to him with a serious look.
“Your sister was a model of fidelity,” she said. “Unlike some, and not that her husband much deserved it.”
“I dare say he did not.”
“I wonder if you know what a Creole husband can be,” Madame Cigny said thoughtfully. Robert picked up a china figurine from a table and snapped the head off it. Madame Cigny clucked her tongue at him, but made no further remonstrance. The nurse, who had soothed the baby into a doze, took him by the hand and led him out.
“I hardly know what to tell you,” Madame Cigny said.
“I thought perhaps she had been here,” the doctor said. “That she might have spoken to you.”
“Yes, she has been here, but she didn’t speak—I mean, nothing of moment.” Madame Cigny touched a finger to her lips. “That would have been a couple of months ago. Yes, and I wondered that she would be traveling with the baby so small…” She colored, charmingly. “Of course Hélo?se was very new—I fear I was distracted.”
“C’est tout á fait naturel,” the doctor said.
“We have been great friends, your sister and I,” said Madame Cigny. “But she might have chosen to tell me nothing, if she did have intentions. Then I would have nothing to tell Thibodet if he came inquiring. But I believed she was returning to him when she left here.”
“Anything that you could tell me would be useful,” the doctor said. “I know so little of her pastimes, her acquaintance.”
“She does have one particular friend, or did,” said Madame Cigny. “Xavier…oh, I don’t know him well myself. Xavier Tocquet, yes, I believe. I’m told he has a little coffee plantation somewhere, and he imports cattle from the Spanish side. It may be that he owns property in Santo Domingo.”
“Indeed,” said the doctor.
“Après tout, she is a widow now,” said Madame Cigny. “If she knew that her husband were dead she might well return. Of course you must take care to insert a notice in the Spanish papers, and in the Windward Isles too. I’m certain that it all can be retrieved with little damage. A reputation is less easily destroyed here than in Europe.”
The doctor inhaled, then sighed out rather forcefully. “You reassure me,” he said. “I will certainly follow your suggestions.” He uttered a few pleasantries about the Cigny children, and stood up.
“You’ll give Elise my love when you see her,” Madame Cigny said, rising in her turn. “Let her know that she is welcome here, as always.” The doctor bowed over her hand and went out.
OUTDOORS HE WAS DISORIENTED by the light and heat, and in any case he had no plan. He had forgotten to ask for Tocquet’s address, and he didn’t like to go back for it so soon. Perhaps Bourgois would know the man. He recalled having heard somewhere that the Creole model of fidelity was to limit oneself to a single extramarital lover at a time. Mulling this over, he found himself carried along in a thickening stream of people, blacks and mulattoes mostly, washing along toward the Place de Clugny and into the midst of le marché des nègres.
He had not imagined such a crowd, the largest assembly of any people, black or white, he’d yet seen in the colony. There must literally have been thousands of them packed into the square, mostly dressed for festival, and all chattering frantically in Creole. The doctor was learning to make out some words of the patois, but here the voices merged in a single roar. Still, if he let his attention lapse, the choir was close to musical, and certainly it prevented him from concentrating on his worries. He let the shiftings of the crowd carry him around at random. Soon he was shuffled up against the butchers’ booths. The meat was wrapped in netting to keep off flies, but nevertheless the smell was strong, and the doctor fought his way a little farther, along the west side of the square, among the vendors of live poultry. Here a speckled cock and a red one were managing to fight, despite the string that tied their legs together. Some women had formed a half circle around them and were pointing and shouting encouragement; it seemed to the doctor that they might be betting on the result.
At other stands were fruit and vegetables of every description, some transplanted here from Europe and others the doctor had never seen before and could not have identified. Those who sold goat meat were quartered among the vegetable stalls, separate from the other butchers so that they could not fraudulently substitute their meat for mutton; the skinned goats still wore their hairy tails, as a further indicator. The doctor watched exchanges. Many were barter, the city blacks exchanging their goods for produce brought in by the Negroes of the plain. He stopped before a fish stand, admiring the bloated spiny puffer fish that hung from strings. Farther on he paused to finger a shelf of carved gourds, elaborately worked and colored with fire-blackening and vegetable dye. Most were intended as containers of one kind or another, but some smaller ones had been left whole with their dry seeds inside, as rattles. The doctor thought of buying one, but considered that he had no use for it.
The crowd swelled up against his back, and he moved on, to another booth where two men were selling songbirds in small basket-work cages. One of them, busy in a rapid negotation with a tall mulatto woman who balanced a basket of fruit on her head, quite resembled one of Crozac’s grooms. The woman he was dickering with was more than striking, though simply dressed in a single wrap of flower-printed cotton that dropped sheer from its binding to her calves, leaving her handsome shoulders bare. She wore a necklace of gold links and a dozen or so thin gold bracelets on one arm, jingling them as she gestured and swung her hips. The doctor could not understand how the basket failed to fall from her head, when she was almost dancing as she spoke. He was staring. She caught his eye and kissed her heavy lips to him, and he realized that he knew her too, one of the women from the theater; she was Nanon.
He took a step back and trod on a bare foot. There was a yelp, but when he turned he couldn’t make out whom he had affronted. One hand on the rough plank that served as a counter, he made his way around the corner of the booth, while the other vendor handed out birdcages over his head and caught coins in return. When he reached Nanon she laid one narrow hand on his shoulder lightly, leaned toward him and pointed into the dim recess of the booth.
“See the funny monkey,” she said. The doctor squinted. Back there in a larger cage was a little spider monkey with a long tail and puffs of white hair at its cheeks. It chittered and wiggled its black fingers.
“Allow me to make you a present of it,” the doctor said, and reached into his pocket. The vendor flashed a grin and named a price, which the doctor paid without question. Nanon began giggling at him as he lifted the cage by its wicker loop.
“Oh, you are too rich,” she said, laughing as if the thought amused her hugely. “You don’t bargain.”
Before the doctor could answer she took his hand unconsciously and gave it a friendly squeeze across the knuckles and led him away from the stall. In the press of people he was forced back behind her, but she kept him in tow, her crooked forefinger linked with his. Meanwhile the monkey’s tiny hands thrust through the lattice and plucked at the fine hairs on his wrist. He kept his eye on Nanon’s head and the miraculously balanced basket. Her hair was done in a chignon, curving down clublike on the back of her neck, and caught in a fine web of gold thread. She was cutting diagonally across the square, toward the monumental fountain in the center, which displayed an image of the sun atop an Ionic column. When they reached it the doctor pulled her up and stopped to read the inscription.
“They executed Ogé here,” Nanon said. “Chavannes aussi…”
The doctor jerked his head up, but her expression was unreadable. She took his hand again and pulled him forward through the crowd, and he followed with no demurral, though his head was humming. He knew little of Ogé except that he had raised an ill-organized and unsuccessful rebellion last October, intended to force compliance with one of the inscrutable decrees from the metropole which seemed to guarantee some political rights for some of the mulattoes. Events had proved him a fool, and his attempt had accomplished nothing or worse, but many said he had died bravely, under terrible torture, and here on this spot. The doctor watched Nanon’s chignon bobbing; she had not once looked back. By caste and color she would be Ogé’s partisan, but reprisals against mulattoes had been so vicious after the rebellion failed, here in Le Cap and everywhere, that who knew what she might be thinking? He knew just as well that his skin could not reveal to her his sentiments. So far as she could tell he might be a royalist, or one of the faction seeking independence or even an English protectorate for the colony, or the sort of scurvy revolutionist that had surfaced in the coastal cities in reponse to all the movements back in Paris. Or something altogether else; he supposed this last case was the truest. He did not think of letting go her hand.
Nanon lived in two rooms below the Place d’Armes; in fact it was not far at all from the inn where he was staying, and Crozac’s stable yard. Much of her furniture was painted wickerwork, and there were a few pieces in mahogany, including a small cabinet which displayed some china bibelots from Europe, a wooden matrioshka doll, and several curious carvings that looked to be of local origin. The doctor set the monkey’s cage down on a low table and followed his hostess’s beckoning hand into the second room, where the first thing that caught his eye was rack on rack of extravagant clothing, filling half the space; the dresses ranged from European fashion to the sort of improvised garment she was wearing today. She laughed to see him so startled, and gathered a great mass of the clothes into herself, hugging them close and smiling with her cheek pressed against a carnation of multicolored fabric. The doctor blinked. There were two beds in the room, one ordinary, covered with a cinnamon Persian rug. The other was a low daybed, with head and footboards carved like a sleigh, but double width. The doctor nodded as if to affirm something, he knew not what, and withdrew into her salon. Nanon let the dresses fall back on their hangers. One slipped to the floor, but she ignored it, following him.
The light was lowering, glaring in the window that overlooked the street, and reflecting back from the large mirror that hung on the opposite wall. Triangulated by the beams, the monkey scrambled in its cage, which allowed it little room to maneuver. Nanon walked around the doctor and stooped to look at it. She closed one eye, then the other, back and forth. The monkey stopped what it was doing and stared at her.
She smiled up at the doctor. “Oh, take him out,” she said. “I want to hold him.”
His misgivings were insufficient to stop him from opening the door of the cage. A brown blur, the monkey raced up his arm and clawed its way to the top of his head. The doctor ducked and whirled around, but the monkey seized hold of his ears and held on desperately. Nanon was laughing herself breathless, her head thrown back, while the doctor slapped at his head as if it had caught fire. The monkey gathered itself and sprang to the top of the rolled blind above the window, where it clung with all four paws, its head twisted around like an owl’s to scream its indignation down at them.
Nanon doubled over, her laughter tailing off into gasps, then straightened up and caught her breath. The doctor reached for the monkey’s dangling tail, but it twitched up out of reach immediately, and he stood with his arms akimbo, frowning. Nanon undid the net from her chignon and shook her hair down to her collarbone.
“Let down the blind,” she suggested.
The doctor found the strings and worked them to unwind the roller, but the monkey walked the spool like an acrobat on a floating log, and was still holding its position when the blind dropped to the sill. The doctor cast about for a cane or stick or something to dislodge it, but he couldn’t see well in the suddenly darkened room. His ears were red where the monkey had mauled them.
“Let him be.” Nanon’s voice sucked down to its center like a whirlpool. “Let him stay there…for a little.”
The doctor turned in time to see her touch herself cunningly just above the breastbone. The cotton wrap came undone spontaneously and whispered to the floor. The necklace winked at him, her bare skin changed its surface like a leopard’s coat as she moved forward under the white-hot dots and bars of light that leaked through the weave of the blind. Her bracelets softly belled together as she reached out, and wherever she touched him a piece of his clothing fell away as though cut with a hot knife.
Now he understood the function of the daybed. He lay on his back, her hair curtaining him from the navel down. Its fringe moved on his belly in a slow caress. It was happening very slowly, and still at a speed he could not stop, but she stopped sharply, with a low hoarse cry, and swung her long ivory leg up and over him. He saw her eyes. Her lips, which looked so large and cushiony, were lively, muscular on his. Her skin was hot, and acidly tart. He seemed to feel none of her weight, but only a slow stroking movement, her nipples circling on his chest; maybe she was supporting herself on knees and elbows, or maybe she was levitating. Cell by cell he was being strained into her. He caught at her hips, the knob of bone at the small of her back, and bridged himself up and nearer.
Their mouths pulled apart with an audible rip. He saw her eyes barred by her lashes, and heard her breathing over him, “Tournestoi, vite, comme ?a.” With a lithe and powerful movement, she reversed herself and slid under him, agile as a stoat. Instantly they were engaged again, if they had ever come apart. He put his hand on the back of her neck and she flattened herself willingly against the sheet, clinging to the scrolled headboard with both her hands. Her mouth uttered some phrases of Creole, then no words, while from the waist down she moved in ways his study of anatomy would not have led him to think possible. He watched her cheek flushing, her mouth bloom to a burning red as it spread against the fabric. A wave surged up and carried him high but instead of crashing down when it broke he went sailing away into space.
Lying half across her back, he felt her heart pulsing toward his through his chest wall. He rested a little, then slipped to the inside of the bed, drew her over on her side and touched her face between his two hands. She looked at him, and curled her fingers around his wrists. Motes of gold swam in the brown swirl of her eyes. The cool rings of her bracelets pressed against his inner arm. He’d lost all sense of his identity; the last vestige of the personality he’d brought into the room eddied somewhere high above like a flake of ash from some great conflagration. Perhaps it had an eye, and watched the scene. He’d slipped his boundaries; there were capabilities in him he’d never known. This was vertigo. He might have slept a little. When he came to himself the light was slightly fading and Nanon was up and wrapped in her sarong, slipping out the door and signaling him with a palm-down gesture to remain.
He lay on his back, sweat drying on the small hairs of his stomach, and watched the dust flecks spinning in the planes of light that penetrated the window lattice. But he felt too alert to doze again, and besides, the mosquitoes were beginning to come whining in. After a while he got up and put on his trousers and shirt. Barefoot, he padded into the other room. The monkey had got the curio cabinet open and was picking out each piece for a close scrutiny and then dropping it to the floor; miraculously none had yet broken. With a quick occult movement, the doctor caught it by the furry nape of its neck. The monkey shrieked and screwed its head around, but it couldn’t reach to bite him. As he put it back in the cage he caught sight of himself in the mirror and smiled.
Returning to the bedroom, he put his eye to a gap in the lattice over the window and looked into the inner courtyard of the block. Under the eave of the house was a clay oven and some iron cooking pots stacked beside a fire, which had burned down to coals under a layer of white ash. Nanon hunkered on her heels by the fire, chattering with two black women in starched white head-cloths, and stirring a pot with a long-handled spoon. Under her left arm sat a black hen with a red wattle, its eye glassily lidded, as if in a trance. The doctor watched her with admiration and a trace of envy too. He felt hollow, drilled out inside, a nameless vacancy that matched his dizziness. She could squat by the fire with the blacks or come into these pleasant rooms with him; she was more free.
This thought was yet half formed when he was distracted by the sight of a man in dandy dress approaching the cook fire from across the court. Nanon laid down the pot and stood up smoothly from her heels to greet him. The hen cackled and struggled under her arm; she adjusted it and soothed it with little strokes along the length of its wings. Her back was to the doctor, and over her shoulder he could see the man’s face; it was that same strange speckled mulatto he’d noticed before at his inn. He seemed angry, or somehow distressed. His hands moved before him in cramped imperious cuts, but his voice was too low for the doctor to make out, and beneath the suspension of his freckles his expression was very hard to read.
Nanon’s voice rose to a sharp note. She stepped aside, closing her hand over the hen’s head entirely, and whirled it around so that its own weight broke its neck. The black wings jerked convulsively as she tore the head right off with another twist, and directed the bright jet of blood into the courtyard. The man jumped back, while the black women cackled at him from around the fire. The doctor watched him stalk away, brushing irritably at spatters, real or imagined, on his fine clothes.
In the other room Doctor Hébert picked up the trinkets and rearranged them in the cabinet. The monkey chittered at him constantly; he supposed it wanted food. He went back to the daybed and stretched himself out, only long enough to clear his head, he thought, but he did sleep, and heavily. When he awakened it was dark and Nanon was calling him to the table.
She gave him oyster stew and roasted chicken stuffed with nuts and pineapple. There was a dish of spinach and two kinds of melon; she had a very creditable wine. The doctor ate with fervor. Some part of that emptiness he’d felt was hunger, so it seemed. He was coming back more and more to himself as he ate, but it was not altogether a pleasant sensation. Nanon had eaten rather more lightly. She was slipping bits of chicken through the slats of the monkey’s cage.
“See how he eats,” she said. “He’s like a little man.”
Solemnly the monkey shredded chicken and fingered it into its small mouth. The doctor smiled awkwardly, beginning to feel himself uncomfortably apelike. He did not quite know how to manage the thing he thought must be expected of him.
“I—” he began, and flapped his aimless hands around the table. “All this, everything, I should—I’d like to…”
Nanon gave him a cool look. “We will be friends,” she said. “You’ve done a thing for me already, the night we met, and I remember it, comme tu vois.” Their eyes connected; again the doctor felt the vertiginous depth of the self he didn’t know. She smiled. “Of course, you may bring me presents if you like.”
The doctor scratched the back of his neck, unconsciously, where a mosquito must have bitten him. He was unsure if he was dealing with professional euphemism or something altogether apart from that. So far as his person was concerned he was without much illusion; he knew that he was prematurely bald, and pear-shaped (though stronger than he looked), that he had spent the greater part of his youth blinded to the world by his studies, that he had no conversation, that he was uninteresting to any woman he had ever met. Heretofore he had expressed his carnal nature only through transactions much more plainly professional than this.
“To be sure, I approve of friendship,” he finally said. He toyed with a melon rind, and went on without knowing that he would. “Who was that man I saw you with outside?”
For just an instant, the barest glimpse, she looked as if she’d been stabbed with ice. Then she was laughing merrily as ever. “Oh, you are jealous,” she said. “Bon ?a.” She rose and came around the table toward him. “I think you must have eaten and rested enough, then,” she said. “Let’s see how well you are restored.”