Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? by Maryse Condé Read Free Book Online Page B

Celanire had laid out flower beds and introduced heavy-scented roses together with tulips and carnations she had shipped from France. In an aviary dozed papilios, giant butterflies with yellow velvety wings striped black and blue. For Hakim, such serenity was deceiving. He imagined the Home to be like the castle of a Sleeping Beauty, waiting for the night to begin its life of debauchery. He crossed the bamboo grove, his feet sinking into the thick carpet of lawn. The widow Desrussie showed him into a boudoir where everything seemed unreal. In the penumbra, the murky eyes of the mirrors gazed back at him. The chimeras on the screens opened wide their jaws to swallow him, swinging their heavy ringed tails in every direction. He was about to beat a retreat when he caught sight of Celanire watching him, lying on a sofa. She was draped in a silk kimono, encrusted with the same chimeras. A kerchief dripped red around her neck. She motioned to him to sit down close to her, and he was overcome with nausea at the pervading smell of female. He managed to pull himself together, however, while she explained her circumstances in a mournful voice. She had been bedridden for days with a bout of fever, and she truly thought she wouldn’t make it alive. He asked her unimaginatively if she had forgotten to take her quinine, and she shrugged her shoulders. Quinine? She didn’t believe in those miracle remedies for whites. In Guadeloupe, her papa taught her the virtues of poultices and herbs. Zèb à Fè. Koklaya. Té simen kontran . Africa had the same pharmacopeia. That’s how she had taken care of herself. Why is she always talking about her papa, Hakim thought irritatedly, especially if he’s not her real papa? Hakim had not kept his promise, Celanire complained, and had never come to see her. He apologized. He was overworked at Betti Bouah’s and spent his time dashing from one village to another. He was endeavoring to embellish his new life with a set of adventures when she cut him short. Did he like that kind of work? He remained speechless. This woman could read him like an open book.
    She laid her hand on his knee, burning it like a firebrand, and then lectured him. You must always like what you do. She had a mission: transform this humble Home for Half-Castes into a monument that would go down in people’s memories. For the first time in the history of the colony, her school was entering four girls for the native diploma of elementary studies. The Africans subjugated and mutilated their women. The French taught them merely how to thread a needle and use a pair of scissors. Now they were going to see something else. She did not hide the fact that she had ambitious plans. She had given a lot of thought to the reasons why relations between Africans and the French came up against a stumbling block. Because the colonizers, being men, could only think in terms of men. It was the men they invited to share in their projects. It never occurred to them to ask the women. Whereas in Africa, more than anywhere else, the women welcomed change, which could only be to their advantage. They were tired of working themselves to death, tired of being treated as subalterns, tired of being humiliated, beaten, and abused. Only the women could hold colonization in check for one very good reason. Once the colonizer had clasped a black woman in his arms, could he ever be the same again? No, no, and no! Ever since Thomas de Brabant had found happiness with her, he had become another man. He saw Africa through different eyes. He who was once so contemptuous, so convinced that the continent knew nothing of art and civilization, she had persuaded him to open a museum, and he had started collecting those very same masks he used to swear he would burn in an auto-da-fé. The Home for Half-Castes would be that meeting place that was sorely lacking, a privileged place where love between the races would fructify, grow, and multiply. That