Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [319]
Toussaint had now swung to a sitting position on the edge of the cot, his left arm folded over his chest. He’d been fully dressed beneath the blanket: the brown woolen trousers and smock, the baggy coat, a round hat over the tails of the yellow kerchief he always insisted on wearing, apparently two or three pairs of socks. As if he’d been lying there ready for escape . . . but of course, it was only the cold that plagued him. With all that clothing he still seemed to shiver.
“Well, get up then,” Amiot told him. “You may put your clothes on the back of the chair.”
Toussaint uttered a terrible cough. It took a long time, and shook him from his heels to the top of his head. At such times it seemed there was no more Toussaint at all, but only the cough animating the body. Then the paroxysm dwindled, or Toussaint succeeded in calming it.
“You have searched me twice tonight,” Toussaint said. His voice was thick with phlegm but otherwise neutral. “Once at twelve and again at four.”
“And so?” Amiot raised his eyebrows high with his smile, but Toussaint did not rise to the lure of mockery.
“It is morning now,” said Amiot. “Another day.”
Toussaint stood up and began to disrobe, draping his garments over the chair as Amiot had told him. Amiot watched to see if he still trembled in the cold but found no sign of it. At last the old man stood naked, all except for his yellow kerchief on his head and a sling he’d recently affected, which supported his left arm.
“Forward march,” said Amiot. “You know the way.”
Toussaint stepped out ahead of him, erect, his pace secure. Once he stopped, at the spasm of another cough, but this time he suppressed it, held it back unuttered. He was still master of himself, Amiot thought grudgingly, if nothing else. When the spasm had passed, he nudged Toussaint between the shoulder blades with a short, silver-tipped ebony stick, to press him toward the doorway. At the threshold he turned back toward his men.
“Search everywhere,” he reminded them. “His clothes, his bedding— don’t forget his food.”
“His food?” Franz glanced from the trencher chilling by the door to Amiot’s face. Might that be counted as insolence?
“You heard my order,” Amiot said. “Search his food.”
Toussaint waited, standing in the center of the adjoining cell, which had been briefly occupied, once before, by his so-called valet, Mars Plaisir. Or he was not waiting at all but simply standing there with the calm indifference of an animal, even to his own nakedness. All furnishings had been removed, and of course there was no fire. Amiot circled Toussaint, tapping the silver-shod stick into his palm, searching for any sign of a tremor in the cold. There was none. He used the silver tip of his stick to lift Toussaint’s testicles and probe between his stringy buttocks. Nothing; he had expected nothing. He’d got the idea of these indignities from horrified descriptions of colonial slave markets published by Les Amis des Noirs. Finally he commanded Toussaint to open his mouth wide and hold it open. For fear of his breath, Amiot did not look very closely inside, but used the stick’s tip to roll Toussaint’s upper and lower lip away from his few remaining teeth.
Throughout, Toussaint remained as unresponsively still as a mahogany carving, his web of scars like errors of the carver’s blade. Amiot felt his own battle scars beneath his clothing. Though Toussaint was so much the older, he had come late to military life, so perhaps his years of service were no more than Amiot’s. Amiot’s scars twisted like red worms on his pale skin, and if he chanced to look at them he remembered pain. Toussaint’s scars looked like curls of foam on a still black sea, and Amiot could not imagine that he felt them.
“Franz!” he called. “Come here, I want you.”
In a moment Franz had appeared.
“Support his ‘injured’ arm,” Amiot ordered him. As Franz complied, Amiot slipped the sling from Toussaint’s left wrist and pulled