In the restaurant, we joked a bit about how seriously Kosti took his mathematical system, and moved on quickly to the subject of my life. Maryse had noticed Piet and Andrea’s flirtations and she was curious which one of the two I preferred.
“Neither,” I replied. “Robert is still very present for me.”
“Yes, it takes time,” she said thoughtfully, and took a long sip of champagne.
“I feel useless in your theater, Maryse,” I said to change the subject, although, in truth, it was something that had begun to worry me. “Pierre is in charge of transportation, Françoise handles the costumes. Even the animals do their part.”
“But my dear, you accompany us and share everything with us. But, if you’d like to be on stage, well, let’s see. . . . You have a lovely voice. I could give you a few lessons, and in no time you could be a mezzo-soprano in a quartet.”
“You only say that because you’ve never heard me sing. Although I like music, I’m the least musical person in the world. The only thing I do well is ride horses.”
“I’m not so sure of that, my dear. I’ve heard tell that any horse you ride ends up dead,” she said, teasing me. “A toast to the soul of the good Jeudi,” she added, raising her glass.
“A toast,” I said, raising mine.
“We should get back. Kosti must be on the verge of breaking the bank by now.”
When we entered the roulette room, very few players were left, and even Kosti had retired for the evening. “He must have lost all of the troupe’s money,” commented Maryse. But when we asked the croupier if the gentleman in the glasses had lost a great deal, he replied: “Quite to the contrary, Madame Polidor. Professor Kosti won over a thousand francs.”
Maryse and I looked at each other and started to giggle like a pair of idiots. “In that case,” said Maryse, emptying her bag onto the table, “I’ll put everything on number nine.”
“Pardon me, madame, but the nine came up twice in a row not ten minutes ago.” The speaker was not one of the players we’d left at the game table when we’d gone to the restaurant; of this I was certain. He was a man in his late forties, tall and good-looking, possibly Spanish, to judge by his accent. He was dressed in black, and a majestic pear-shaped gray pearl hung from his left earlobe. His salt-and-pepper hair, tied back with a red silk ribbon, was nearly as long as mine.
Maryse, without apparent surprise, held the gaze of her exotic interlocutor. Then, turning back to the croupier, she said: “Everything on the nine.”
“In that case, allow me to join you,” said the man in black, nodding his head slightly, and, addressing the croupier, he indicated the nine square on the roulette table and said: “A thousand francs on madame’s number.” I noticed that, like Uncle Charles, he wore no rings on his fingers.
“Monsieur?” asked the croupier, obviously thinking he’d heard him wrong. Then the man in black removed his pearl earring and rolled it across the table.
After hesitating a moment, the croupier gestured to a man who appeared to be the manager of the game room. The man approached, examined the pearl and, without a word, placed it on the number nine. Then he took the marble from the croupier’s fingers and, with a practiced motion, spun the roulette wheel in one direction with one hand and sent the ball rolling in the opposite direction with the other. For a moment I thought the ball was going to stay on the nine, but the wheel was still spinning and it jumped onto other numbers.
“Twelve, black,” announced the croupier.
“Well, madame, it could be worse,” said my friend’s admirer from the other side of the table.
“So it could, monsieur,” said Maryse. “But I think you should not have played your beautiful pearl on my number. I don’t tend to have good luck.”
“Luck does not exist, madame. What is meant to be, will be.”
“Who knows? Something to consider.” She took her bag from the table and said to me: “It’s late. We should go.”
“Good night, madame,” he said, looking at her intensely and ignoring me entirely. “Perhaps we shall see each other again.”
“If it’s meant to be, so it shall be.”
Arm in arm with Portelance, Maryse stepped onto the dock in Jacmel and stood there, amazed. Everything she saw seemed so unreal that she felt as though it were one of those monumental stage sets that one used to see years before in the Palais Royal Theater, which, in an effort to capture the ambiance of the Southern Islands, included everything from giant fanciful figureheads to thatched-roofed huts. All along the narrow road that passed in front of the dock moved ox carts and teams of picturesquely adorned donkeys, people on horseback wearing huge straw hats, soldiers and national guardsmen. Vigorous-looking black men came and went, some bare-chested, carrying large baskets, bundles of goat skins, cages filled with chickens and demijohns of rum. Black women, dressed in lightweight cotton and colorful turbans, could be glimpsed among the crowds, balancing baskets of fruit or vegetables on their heads, one hand on their hips, which they swung back and forth as they walked in a careless manner that Maryse determined to imitate as soon as she could find a mirror. Further ahead, at the top of a road paved with rounded stones, the plaza opened out, a fountain with bronze griffins at its center, encircled by rows of little stands in which old women rested on their haunches, selling their wares laid out on tables: fruit, flowers, herbs, pottery, brilliantly colored swaths of cloth, red and yellow silk handkerchiefs, fish, seafood, barrels of salted fish; there were mountains of oranges, pineapples, watermelons, coconuts, great plumed cabbages, white cheeses, bunches of bananas, onions and limes scattered among stalks of sugarcane and hairy-looking tubers that she’d never seen before. Everyone was bartering, gesticulating, laughing and gossiping loudly in the harmonious créole of the colonies.
Maryse looked at her daughter, already almost ten years old, walking wonder-struck between her and Portelance. “Do you like it?” she asked her. Justine, who was rendered speechless, nodded happily.
“And you?” Portelance asked her. Maryse breathed in the dense tropical air, raised her hand to her heart, and said: “It’s the same as it was with you: love at first sight.”
From Jacmel they traveled on a small schooner to Cap-Français. There, they settled in to the grand, Norman-style stone house that Portelance’s father had built. The city, sacked and burned a few years back, was being reconstructed with astonishing speed. Here a new tile roof was going in, over there a façade was being restored or a wall torn down. An army of carpenters and bricklayers worked from sun up to sun down, their Creole songs carrying through the streets on the morning breezes. To Maryse, all that activity seemed like a good omen. At sunset, leaning her elbows on the balcony railing, taking in all the colors of twilight, she liked to think that she, Justine, and Portelance were a kind of prophetic family, in an Old Testament kind of way; a family that, founded on the diversity of races, answered the call of a new era. It was as though the world had become young again in order to welcome them in a sort of celebration.
Inspired by this moment of epiphany, Maryse decided to offer voice and acting lessons with the objective of reinstating the arts in the city. The house soon filled up with students and, after many months of work, she managed to organize a miniscule theater company that performed selected scenes from Racine, Molière, and Beaumarchais. Dazzled by the abundance of talented musicians, she succeeded, with Portelance’s help, in convincing the Government to provide modest funding for an extraordinary musical group that could play, with equal skill, a Rameau overture or a syncopated Creole quadrille. And so, while Portelance assisted the Louverture government in any way he could, while the planters returned from exile and production and commerce improved from day to day, Maryse found herself ever happier in Cap-Français, thanking God for the good health they all enjoyed, and watching Justine