Victoire by Maryse Condé Read Free Book Online

darker stripe down the middle and topped by an enormous tumbler of a belly button.
    Pregnant!
    For whom? By whom?
    Like Oraison with Eliette seventeen years earlier, Fulgence was called to the rescue from his office at the town hall and unbuckled his belt. Victoire was less resilient than her mother. After five bloody lashes on her shoulders, she let it out, the name that Danila had not dared pronounce.
    Thérèse fell into a swoon.
    N OBODY WILL EVER know anything about the relations my grandmother Victoire had with Dernier Argilius.
    That story has been erased. Deleted from memory. But I want to know.
    I want to know how they communicated their desire, where they met and how many times. How did they manage to hide on an island where nothing is secret? Was Victoire pregnant straightaway? What drove her to him? Did her chaste adolescent heart become inflamed at first sight during that famous New Year’s lunch? Didn’t she have any consideration for her godmother, Thérèse, whose passion for Dernier was common knowledge? Or did she want to take revenge on her arrogance? Years later Thérèse told some close friends:
    “Despite everything I did for her, she was always jealous of me. I could see that in her eyes, but I never took her seriously.”
    She claimed that Victoire never felt anything for Dernier. All she was looking for was a man of standing, “a valid father.” She called her an ungrateful wretch, calculating and manipulating. I don’t believe a word.
    As for Dernier, nobody will ever know why the man who possessed the most desirable young girl on Marie-Galante bedded alsoone of the most destitute. Nor why he turned his back on both of them at the same time.
    I can therefore only use my imagination.
    It wasn’t rape; that I’m certain of.
    For her future son-in-law, whose heart she wanted to win through his stomach, Gaëtane used to send over a series of small dishes. At noon Danila would pile the plates on a tray that she covered with an embroidered napkin. With the tray on her head Victoire would trot off to Les Basses, which was then a densely populated suburb on the outskirts of Grand Bourg. She never found Dernier at home. He could be found either at the schoolhouse helping out the dunces, or downing neat rums at the Rayon d’Argent rum store with the party’s farm laborers. She would push open the door, which was never locked (in those days a burglary was unheard of), and arrange the plates on the table. That too was a moment of liberty that she made the most of. In order to comply with his political opinions, Dernier lived in a modest two-room cabin. The place, however, was unique. Books! Piles of books! Everywhere you looked. Piled up on the floor. Stacked haphazardly on shelves along the walls. Some were dog-eared. Others were annotated. Yet others were in shreds. You sensed that their owner loved them and read them. Not like Fulgence, who kept his leather-bound volumes in a mahogany glass cabinet and never touched them.
    What a magical object a book is! Even more so for someone who can’t read, who doesn’t know there are bad books that are not worth sacrificing whole forests for.
    Victoire would turn them over and over again in the palms of her hands. Sometimes she opened them and studied the signs that were indecipherable to her. She regretted her ignorance. Yet her heart did not hold Caldonia to blame. All she wanted to remember was Caldonia’s tenderness. Living a life of solitude, she could constantly hear Caldonia’s grumpy, affectionate voice repeating the riddles whose answers she knew by heart but pretended to search for:
    “On ti bòlòm ka plin on kaz?”
(A little man who fills the whole room.) A candle.
    One day. The heat was suffocating. Dry lightning streaked the sky. The sea was glowing like a gold bar being smelted. With tongues hanging out, the dogs did little else but sniff one another’s backside and seek the shade. Livid, the anole lizards puffed up their dewlaps on the