Chapter Twenty-Two
DAMP, NAKED, SWADDLED IN TOWELING, Arnaud twitched nervously in the wooden chair that had been shifted to the center of the salle de bains. The long shears of the barber-surgeon snicked along the back of his hair.
“Be still,” the barber-surgeon said. Arnaud’s breath snagged. Unintentionally, he went rigid. The barber-surgeon was a white man, a piratical-looking fellow, some sawbones absconded from a ship, undoubtedly. Le Cap had always been awash with scurf like that…The inner voice responsible for these observations seemed to reach Arnaud as from the bottom of a well. Exhaling, he twitched again. A scissor point pricked his neck.
Some hours before, just a short time before sundown, he had entered the town riding pillion behind Captain Maillart, in the midst of the excursionary party. Their aspect drew attention, finally a small crowd, children calling up and down the alleys that the soldiers had captured a weird ape in the jungle, hirsute, fanged, strangely pale and fully as big as a man. Arnaud clung to Maillart’s back, turning his face away from the voyeurs. He’d whispered into the captain’s ear that he might find shelter at the house of the négociant, Bernard Grandmont, but it was a long journey through the catcallers, across town to the neighborhood near the quay.
This was Grandmont’s house, his salle de bains; the négociant had summoned the barber. His slaves had drawn a bath for Arnaud, hot water in a copper tub. It had taken three waters and much assiduous scrubbing for the slaves to bring the mud plasters and grime off his hide. Scoured to a sore flush, Arnaud’s skin revealed its intricate patterning of insect bites and superficial scratches. His hair was hopeless, a carpet of burrs and twigs and thorns. Cut it off and wash and comb whatever might remain.
The barber tipped him backward and plunged his head into a basin. Arnaud stiffened; his arms flailed like the legs of an overset beetle. He concentrated and made his muscles still. Soap was stinging one of his eyes, and his feet jerked spasmodically through pools of water on the flagstone floor. From the doorway, Bernard Grandmont covered him with a grave regard.
Something more than a mere acquaintance, Grandmont often had joined Arnaud’s carouses when the planter came to town. Arnaud was fondest of the ladies, while Grandmont, fearful of the pox, preferred cards or dice. But there was sufficient intersection of their tastes. Grandmont, who served as factor for Arnaud’s sugar and other export goods, had always been ready with a loan if his friend’s amours put him out of pocket (though indeed, he charged a usurious rate on such accommodations). When Maillart had brought Arnaud to the house, Grandmont had at first tried to chaff him over his tatterdemalion appearance, but soon could see that Arnaud, so far from resenting those japes, did not even appear to understand them.
Behind the chair, the barber stropped his razor. He laid one hand on Arnaud’s shoulder; Arnaud trembled in response. Grandmont shifted his weight against the door frame, crossed one buckled shoe above the other.
“Doucement,” he said soberly. “Doucement, Michel.”
His tone was that you’d use to calm a restive horse. The razor was chill on Arnaud’s cheekbone. His breath pulled into a bulbous cul de sac at the rear of his throat. He could draw it no deeper, it would not reach his lungs. The blade stroked down, sheared off the hair. It was sharp enough it hardly pulled, but Arnaud’s skin still crawled behind its path. With a rough movement, the barber twisted his head back, exposing the stubble on his neck. An odor of tainted meat breathed across Arnaud’s face, and the barber snickered as he spoke.
“Be very still,” the barber said. “Sinon, I’ll cut your throat.”
ARNAUD HAD ALWAYS KEPT A CHANGE or two of clothing at Grandmont’s house, since he often stayed here when visiting Le Cap. In an earlier period, Claudine had sometimes accompanied him here. Was that a faint trace of her scent when Grandmont drew open his closet door?—No, it was impossible.
During his errors through the jungle, Arnaud had lost his plumpness, and the old clothes fit him poorly now, the trousers hanging slackly from his hipbones. By the light of a candle flickering in Grandmont’s bedchamber, he faced the mirror, startling at the sight of his own eyes. His cheeks had lost their convex curve and in the hollows below the bones the barber had missed twin patches of shallow stubble that glistened now in the candlelight.
“Yes, you are quite yourself again,” Grandmont said. “Or if not quite, at least recognizably so. You must have an appetite—for something better than bananas or salt beef. Shall we go out? Or—
“Mais non.” Arnaud turned sharply from the mirror. His hands were shaking; he looked down at them in confusion.
Grandmont reached into a corner and presented him with a walking stick. Automatically Arnaud grasped it with both hands. It was dark in color, surprisingly lightweight, and formed in a curious double spiral that ran its full length. He looked up uncertainly at Grandmont as his fingers slipped naturally into the grooves.
“A bull’s pizzle,” Grandmont said. “You must have seen them made so in France.”
Arnaud kept staring.
“Haven’t you always carried a cane?” Grandmont said. “I give it to you—a present. Come, we’ll eat in the kitchen.”
Grandmont’s kitchen was brightly lit, scarcely a shadow in it anywhere, and in fact Arnaud did feel more comfortable there, especially after Grandmont had dismissed his cook. The odor of well-cooked, well-seasoned food excited him, and the first bite brought a painful burst of saliva at the rear of his jaws, but he could not eat as much as he desired; his stomach had shriveled. He pushed aside his plate and sat, sipping the wine that Grandmont had served him, and rolling the spiral cane across his knees. The movement seemed to stop the trembling of his hands.
Grandmont completed his own meal and raised his head to look across the table. He had clear eyes and a straight nose, but his chin was weak and he had more teeth than his small mouth could accommodate; they jostled together and pushed outward to deform his lips, giving his whole face a ratlike aspect. Because he presented his face confidently, with no apparent idea of its ugliness, it had small effect on the people he knew.
“Coffee? Or rum?” Grandmont asked. “There is no brandy to offer you at the moment, I am sorry…”
“Yes, rum,” Arnaud said. Grandmont got up, clearing the plates with his own hands, and brought a bottle and two glasses to the table. He reached into an inner pocket and took out two cheroots and passed one to his guest. Arnaud leaned forward to light his at the candle. He felt an unaccustomed giddiness; it was long since he had smoked.
“Well, you doubtless have your tale to tell.” Grandmont said, exhaling toward the ceiling. “Whenever you are ready.”
Arnaud began to unfold his story. He rolled the cane back and forth over his thighs, kneading them—his old mannerism. As he did so he felt his voice better integrated with himself, and he was surprised and grateful for Grandmont’s subtlety in offering him the cane. The taste of rum and tobacco were sweet familiarities. He reminded himself not to drink too much, and this thought too was proper to Michel Arnaud, grand blanc, proprietor, and manager of men. In the telling he was careful to falsify the purpose that had brought him to Ouanaminthe, for Grandmont, so far as he knew, had not not been privy to the Sieur Maltrot’s plot. This caution too belonged to his ancient character. When he told what he had seen of Candi, he was scrupulous to omit the role of Choufleur.
“Ah, Candi, yes…” Grandmont leaned back and blew smoke rings at the ceiling, neatly targeting the second through the dissipating circle of the first. “Perhaps you don’t know that he has become our ally now…”
“Comment!” Arnaud lurched forward in his chair.
“Yes, he has been accepted into our militia,” Grandmont said. “As a junior officer. I know it must seem strange to you, but he brought many men, and you know that the situation is desperate now, you know it better than I, I think.”
“Yes, but it’s unthinkable—that monster.” Arnaud snapped, feeling a thrust of his old seigneurial rage.
“Who can say any longer what is possible?” Grandmont said. “But never mind. When things are settled, there’ll be another reckoning. For Candi…among others. I think you understand.”
Arnaud caught his breath, then went on with his tale. He told of the priest and of his rescue, how they had set out together to regain his plantation, the manner in which they’d been forced to part.
“Et après?” Grandmont asked.
“I blundered onto the place in the end,” Arnaud said. “Home. There was nothing left of it, nothing at all, all burned to the ground. Ashes and charcoal.” His mind’s eye slipped over the single shed left standing, with its contents. “The slaves all run away—or murdered. And God only knows what happened to my wife—”
“Ah, Claudine!” Grandmont said suddenly. “Of course, forgive me, you could not have known.”
Arnaud grew attentive, bending his ear for notes of artificiality. Grandmont knew something of the estrangement between Claudine and himself.
“She is here in this town, and she is well—she is safely here, at least.”
“How did she come here?” Arnaud said.
“Well may you ask,” said Grandmont. “It is a most extraordinary story.”
BIDDEN TO DINE CHEZ CIGNY, Claudine Arnaud found herself seated at a table that included her hostess and her husband, the philosophe Maillart, the négociant Bourgois with his wife, and some others whose names Claudine had not registered. Of late she had often been summoned to fêtes of this kind, and often at the home of perfect strangers. Emilie Lambert, seated directly across the table from her, was the only person here Claudine had known previously, and neither her mother nor her sisters were present. Claudine had not seen the family all together since she had left the Flaville town-house to seek her retreat at the convent of Les Ursulines.
She ate mechanically, timing her forkfuls by those of the other ladies at the table. The food went down, dry and tasteless. Wine evaporated in the glass that had been set at her left hand. She had not moved to touch it. Her fork was pinched in the fingers of her right glove, for she always wore gloves now, even to eat. Her left hand was cuddled on her lap, the empty ring finger of the glove pinned to the palm.
There was conversation, in which Madame Arnaud took the smallest possible part. Monsieur Bourgois and a youth whom Isabelle Cigny addressed as Pascal would pay her occasional compliments. These she deflected, often without so much as a word, only a deprecating flip of her gloved right hand. She scarcely listened to anything that was said, but her eyes took in the state of things beneath the surface of their chatter.
In Monsieur Cigny she recognized an irritable cuckold who most certainly would have preferred to spend his evening elsewhere. It was the reverse of the situation that had obtained between herself and Arnaud; Isabelle Cigny threw it in her husband’s face. Both of the two young men seated right and left of her, Pascal and the junior officer called Henri, had clearly been her lovers at one time, but Claudine sensed that she was bored with them now, that in general she must suffer from ennui. Madame Bourgois, some twenty-five years younger than her husband, had only recently come out from France, and was clearly unfamiliar with Creole ways, and altogether too admiring of her friend Isabelle. Monsieur Bourgois for his part seemed oblivious to the dangers inherent in this acquaintance. Emilie Lambert, meanwhile, had her own recent experience of male nature to try to reconcile with all this worldliness.
The plates were cleared, the wine refilled. Madame Cigny got to her feet; her husband, grumbling, followed suit. A little murmur ran round the table. Isabelle Cigny lifted her glass with two hands like a priest raising a chalice.
“Let us do honor to our guest,” she said. “To her great determination—to her beautiful courage. Madame Arnaud!”
The toast was taken—a muted cheer erupted from the gentlemen. As the dinner party resettled itself, Claudine deliberately raised her left hand and laid it next to the right, in the space on the table where her plate had been. She felt how all eyes rolled to the maimed glove.
“You must tell us,” Monsieur Cigny began, in tones of someone whose toe has just been crushed by his wife’s heel, “tell us how you found such resolution.”
“But perhaps the recollection is too painful,” said Isabelle Cigny, with a polished insincerity.
“Oh tell, do tell.” It was a chorus. Claudine was well enough prepared for it. She cleared her throat, but her voice was still croaking when she spoke.
“C’etait rien. Any one of you would certainly have done the same.” She pressed her fingertips to the table and raised her palms like a pianist. Several people talking at once denied what she had said. Pascal turned to Emilie Lambert.
“Don’t let her hide behind this modesty,” he said to her. “You must tell us how it was.”
Emilie’s eyes were moist in the candlelight. Ah, child, Claudine thought, but with little bitterness, we have both to sing for our supper now. That was always the way of it; some member of the Lambert survivors would be coerced into attendance, to draw Claudine out, fill in details that she omitted. And tonight the story was unfolded in like manner, a series of coy hesitations; only Claudine understood the deeper reluctance that was masked. Tonight, she let Emilie bear the brunt of it. She felt for the girl, but could not move herself to help her. When obliged to, she put in a word or a correction. The shadow of her crippled hand wavered on the table’s polished wood. She raised her palm a little higher, to see how the empty finger was clipped to the cloth. Formerly Arnaud had been in the custom of chaining up the ankle of a recaptured runaway to an iron collar round his neck, so that the slave must skip about with one leg drawn up behind; this was the punishment that preceded amputation. Emilie had come to the point where the Congo’s band intercepted the wagon.
“And then Madame Arnaud stood up,” she said. “Like a statue, or a figurehead…”
“Like a goddess.” Madame Bourgois supplied the simile.
Like a witch, Emilie thought privately. “She denounced them,” she went on. “She shamed them from our path.”
“‘In the name of God,’” said Madame Cigny in a ringing tone. “‘Let us pass.’”
There was a moment’s silence. Claudine turned her palm up so that her stigmatum could be witnessed. As customary, the description of her actual sacrifice was elided.
“She saved you,” Madame Bourgois, pinkening with excitement, said to Emilie, “from a terrible violation.”
Claudine watched the pulse beating in the hollow of the young wife’s throat. Dear lady, she whispered to herself, you would not have enjoyed the fact so much as you seem to enjoy the thought.
“Yes,” Emilie murmured, with a lopsided smile. Her eyes looked as if they would well over. “Yes, of course.” Many had turned to admire the purity of her virginal emotion. In the interest of her daughters’ futures, Madame Lambert had concealed what actually had happened to them. Thus the stage was inadvertently set for the exquisite cruelty of these recitals to be visited upon them all.
“Others have been less fortunate,” Claudine said, releasing Emilie from the skewer of attention.
“Vraiment,” said Isabelle Cigny. “Even some of those who owed you their salvation.” She turned to Maillart. “We have heard from your gallant cousin that Doctor Hébert and the girl Marguerite were lost on that unlucky expedition.”
“Yes,” Maillart said gravely. “Thus far there has been no word of them.”
Isabelle Cigny clicked her tongue. “So reckless of them. To expose themselves a second time. Can one look for two miraculous interventions?”
“We must pray for their safety,” Maillart said sonorously. “There may still be hope.”
A silence fell. After a moment, Madame Bourgois punctured it. “The horrors one hears of,” she said, bending again toward Emilie. “From those less fortunate than yourself.”
“Madame Dessouville, for example,” Claudine said. All attention at once swung back to her, that she would raise this subject in mixed company.
“I have not heard of Madame Dessouville,” Madame Bourgois said expectantly.
“She was waylaid with her husband in attempting to escape from Dondon,” Claudine said. “They raped her across her husband’s dead body, though she was pregnant and near her time. When they had done, they cut the infant from the womb and slaughtered it before her dying eyes.”
“Tout á fait comme d’habitude,” Isabelle Cigny said quickly. What she said was true enough, though the routine character of such atrocities was seldom alluded to. She smiled thinly around the table, then stood up. The ladies would withdraw for coffee, leaving the gentlemen to their wine. Claudine had the right of precedence, but she hung back, and Madame Cigny caught her sleeve and held her in the doorway.
“Should I apologize?” she asked.
“Comment?”
“For making you a spectacle,” said Isabelle Cigny, and Claudine thought fleetingly of strangling her or clawing her eyes out there on the spot.
“I did so want to meet you,” Isabelle continued.
“Yes,” Claudine said. She looked into the other woman’s face and found her stare met firmly. After all, she could not quite dislike her. Isabelle Cigny clutched at both her hands.
“Tell me, how did you do it really? La verité.”
“The truth?” Claudine said. “I wanted to know if I could feel something.” She smiled politely, let it fade, and turned to follow the other ladies toward the drawing room.
IN THE MORNING ARNAUD left Grandmont’s house rather early to set out for Les Ursulines. It was a considerable distance, but he walked the whole way, scarcely noticing his surroundings. He carried the cane Grandmont had given him, though he found he could not swing it so freely as he’d been wont to do with the one he’d formerly possessed, but had to make actual use of it sometimes, to support him through the dizzy spells that occasionally overtook him.
Midway he crossed the path of a pair of Negroes bound together in a cart, en route to their place of execution. A crowd was milling all around, screaming insults and throwing stones. Arnaud took only the slightest notice. The cart rolled by, the crowd went with it, the noise and shouts receding. He went on until he’d reached the convent, where he made his business known. A nun escorted him to a small stone room, undecorated but for a brass crucifix screwed into the masonry. He waited. The room was cooler than he would have expected, almost dank. Vines laced over the iron grille that covered the single small window, so that it was quite dim inside.
Presently Claudine came in and sat in a chair beneath the crucifix, at the opposite end of the room from him. Arnaud inspected her from his own seat, not knowing what to say. She wore a loose pale shift and her hair was pulled back very tight, drawing the skin sharply against the bone of her face. In her temples, blue veins forked like lightning.
“My husband,” Claudine said tonelessly. “You’ve fallen off.”
Arnaud glanced down at his bagging breeches. “I was taken prisoner,” he said. “After my escape I was a long time wandering.” He gave no more detail and she requested none. His eye roved to the crucifix, then to the window, where a hummingbird hovered before a blossom on the vine. Claudine sat with her gloved hands decorously folded, right over left in her lap. Arnaud used his stick to help him to his feet.
“They tell me you are become a sort of heroine,” he said.
“They are greatly deluded.” Claudine turned her face to the wall. He crossed the room more quickly than she could react, raised her maimed hand and turned it over. For an instant it appeared to him that the pin passed not only through the glove’s palm but also the skin beneath.
“Everything is destroyed,” Arnaud blurted. “All our plantation. It’s all gone as if it never was—all but the dog shed. There’s something in there—did you know of it?”
Claudine mutely shook her head. Her lips sucked in across her teeth; she would not look at him. Arnaud dropped to one knee. He clawed the glove from her left hand and frantically began kissing the stump. In a moment she had snatched her hand away from him. Arnaud fell back and groveled at her feet.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I’ve done you many injuries.”
“No—it’s nothing,” Claudine said. She had placed both hands across her stomach, as if to quell a pain. “It’s only—I am with child.”
Arnaud got to his feet and took a backward step, staring at her in amazement, wonder even.
“Don’t mistake yourself,” Claudine said. “It’s no cause for rejoicing. If ever you see it, you will know.”
“Do you mean—?”
“I don’t mean that,” Claudine said. “The child is yours.” She rose silently from her seat; wraithlike, she left the room.
ARNAUD REACHED THE STREET in a welter of unfamiliar feelings. He stumbled along for quite some distance without paying any attention to his direction. As he began to regain a sense of his surroundings, he noticed a young mulatto in a brocaded coat coming along the way toward him.
“Bonjour,” Choufleur said, smiling ironically. “So pleased to see that you are well.”
Arnaud’s eyes bulged. He looked at the cane which Choufleur was negligently dangling. “That cane belongs to the Sieur Maltrot,” he said.
“Formerly,” Choufleur said. “It belonged. I have inherited it.”
“You yellow bastard,” Arnaud said, and swung Grandmont’s bull pizzle back behind his shoulder for a blow. “When I denounce you, you’ll be hung from the nearest lamppost—I’ll see you broken on the wheel.”
Before he could bring down the stick, Choufleur darted inside his striking range and grabbed him by the neck. There was strength enough in his one free hand to shut down Arnaud’s air supply.
“And if I denounce you?” Choufleur hissed. “The Pompons Rouges have a recipe for royalist conspirators. Don’t you remember le chevalier de Mauduit? They’ll cut your balls off and make you swallow them, just as they did with him.”
Choufleur shoved Arnaud against the wall. “Do you see the strength of our mutual interest?” he grinned. “Good day.”
For a moment, Arnaud floundered dizzily, small black dots spinning behind his eyes. He coughed and regained his breath. Rage swelled all through him as he pushed himself upright with both hands on the stick, but Choufleur was right; he could do nothing now. He kept on walking, there was nothing else to do. But with the flood of anger in him, he felt much more himself than he had done for a long time.