Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [4]
Toussaint Louverture
As he ran over those words in his mind, it seemed to him that his wounds must all reopen. To dwell upon thoughts such as these was to call the spirit of Ezili Jé Rouge, enraged with the bitterness of her losses and the terrible betrayals she had suffered. With her nails and her teeth she would tear at her clothing and the ground where she crouched, lay open her own cheeks in bloody furrows, and otherwise rend the flesh of the postulants she possessed.
But Toussaint never walked with Ezili Jé Rouge. Ezili Fréda he had sometimes known, the sponsor of love, who bore the great wound in her heart with patience and devotion. If he trusted Caffarelli in little else, Toussaint did trust him to deliver the letter he had written to Suzanne. Which by this time he must have done, so that even now it might be in her hands.
Ma cher Epouse,
Je profite l’occasions dunt bon général pour vous donné mé nouvel. J’ai été malade an narrivant ici, mais le commandant de cet place qui et un homme umain ma porté toute les cecours possible; grâce à Dieu, sa va beaucoup mieu; vous savé mon namitier pour ma famille et mon nattachement pour une femme que je chéris, pour quoi mavé vous pas donné de vos nouvel.
Bon jour à toute pour moi. Je les pryer d’être bien comporté, beacoup de sageste, et la vertus. Je vous sé déjà dire que vous sète responsable de lheure conduite devant Dieu et à votre maris, mandé moi ci Placide et tavec vous.
Je vous sanbras tout tandrement. Je suis pour la vis votre fidèle époux.4
Toussaint Louverture
Then it seemed that Suzanne was near him for a moment, without the bars and the frozen stone walls and the free-falling descents from the cliffs of these Jura Mountains. He calmed, and a generous glow of warmth spread below his breast bone. The dangerous spirit of self-destruction had withdrawn. Without emotion, he recalled Blanc Cassenave, who’d died in the jail where Toussaint had sent him, so furious at the injustice he felt he’d received that his heart had exploded in his chest. But it was he himself, and not Toussaint, who’d broken faith and turned to treachery—Blanc Cassenave died by the work of his own hands.
The warmth enclosed him now, embraced the surface of his skin. His arms sank down, hands dangling from the wooden arms of his chair. Though the pressure grew uncomfortable on his upper arms, he was not inspired to alter his position. Again he felt Suzanne’s near presence, stirring soupe giraumon in the dooryard of the little house they’d shared at Bréda long ago. He smelled the soup and heard the little cocks so proudly crowing on the slopes of Morne du Cap, and he could hear his three sons breathing near him in the darkness before dawn.
His head snapped back. Before him on the wall appeared the face of a black man, a strong face struggling under terrible duress, cords in his neck stretched to the limit and the eyes and teeth a white rictus of torment and pain. Dieudonné. This was Dieudonné, he knew, though he had never seen his face. His undoing had been accomplished through intermediaries, and at a distance of many miles (though not so long as the distance between Saint Domingue and France). Dieudonné would have taken the ten thousand men he led to join the English invaders at Port-au-Prince (such had been the appearance of the thing), but instead he was betrayed by one of his own seconds and delivered to the mulatto general Rigaud in the south, then locked in a prison where, the story had come back long afterward, he suffocated slowly beneath a weight of chains.
All this was only fever dream. Carefully, Toussaint brought his aching head upright. The tortured face had faded from the wall, and if its glistening surface now resembled the mirrored face of a calm sea, that too was an illusion of his fever.
Receding now, though the pain in his head was worse. The castle bell had been tolling but he had not counted the strokes. The clock on the shelf, notoriously unreliable, read half-past four.
And if the spirit of Dieudonné had risen from beneath the waters