The Madwoman of the Plantation

Seven years later, in a blazing August battered by hurricanes, Eugenia Valmorain gave birth to her first living child, following a series of miscarriages that had destroyed her health. The long desired child arrived when she was no longer able to love it. By then she was a tangle of nerves, falling into lunatic fits in which she wandered through other worlds for days, sometimes weeks. In those periods of delirium she was sedated with tincture of opium, and the rest of the time calmed by infusions brewed from plants raised by Tante Rose, the wise healer of Saint-Lazare, that changed Eugenia's anguish into perplexity, a state more bearable for those who had to live with her. At first Valmorain had mocked "those Negro herbs," but he had changed his mind once he learned of Dr. Parmentier's deep respect for Tante Rose. The physician came to the plantation when his work allowed-despite the setback to his health the ride caused his frail organism-under the pretext of examining Eugenia when in truth he wanted to study Tante Rose's methods. Afterward he tested them in his hospital, noting the results with fastidious precision. He was planning to write a treatise on the natural remedies of the Antilles limited to the botanicals, knowing that his colleagues would never take seriously the magic that intrigued him as much as the plants. Once Tante Rose became accustomed to this white man's curiosity, she often allowed him to go with her to look for specimens in the jungle. Valmorain provided them with mules and two pistols, which Parmentier wore crossed at his waist although he did not know how to use them. The healer would not let an armed commandeur accompany them, because in her view that was the best way to attract bandits. If Tante Rose did not find what she needed in her search, and had no opportunity to go to Le Cap, she charged the physician with obtaining what she needed, so that he came to know in detail the port's thousand stalls of herbs and magic, which supplied people of every color. Parmentier spent hours talking with the docteurs-feuilles, the "leaf doctors" in the stands along the street and in the cubbyholes hidden behind the shops, where they sold natural medicines, witchcraft potions, voodoo and Christian fetishes, drugs and poisons, charms for good luck and others for curses, angel wing dust, and demon's horn. The physician had seen Tante Rose cure wounds that he would have handled by amputation, perform amputations that would have developed gangrene had he done them, and successfully treat the fevers and diarrheas or dysentery that wreaked devastation among the French soldiers crowded together in barracks. "Do not let them have water. Give them a lot of weak coffee and rice soup," Tante Rose taught him. Parmenier deduced that it was all a question of boiling the water, but he also realized that without the healer's herbal infusions there was no recovery. The blacks were relatively immune to those illnesses, but the whites dropped right and left, and if they did not perish within a few days they were left stupefied for months. Nevertheless, for mental derangements as profound as Eugenia's, Negro doctors had no more resources than the Europeans. Blessed candles, purification with sage incense, and rubdowns with snake oil were as useless as the solutions of mercury and ice water baths recommended by medical texts. In the Charenton asylum, where Parmentier had briefly practiced in his youth, there was no treatment for such hopelessly unhinged patients.

At the age of twenty-eight, Eugenia no longer had the beauty that had captured Toulouse Valmorain's love at the consulate's ball in Cuba; she was consumed with obsessions and debilitated by the climate and miscarriages. Her decline had begun to be noted shortly after she arrived at the plantation, and it was accentuated with each of the pregnancies that did not reach full term. She was horrified by the insects that abounded in such infinite variety in Saint-Domingue; she wore gloves, a wide-brimmed hat with a tightly woven, full length veil, and blouses with long sleeves. Two child slaves took turns fanning her, as well as crushing any insect that came anywhere near. A beetle could provoke a crisis. Her mania reached such extremes that she rarely left the house, especially at dusk, the hour of the mosquitoes. She spent her days wrapped within herself and suffered moments of terror or religious exaltation followed by others of impatience, when she struck at everyone within her reach, though never Tete. She depended on the girl for everything, even her most intimate necessities; Tete was her confidante, the only one who stayed by her side when she was tormented by her demons. Tete fulfilled her wishes before they were formulated; she was always alert to pass her a glass of lemonade as soon as thirst was felt, catch on the fly the plate Eugenia threw to the floor, adjust the hairpins that dug into her head, dry her sweat, or set her on the chamber pot. Eugenia did not notice the presence of her slave, only her absence. In her attacks of fear, when she screamed till she had no voice left, Tete closed herself in with her mistress to sing or pray until the fit dissipated, or until she sank into a deep sleep she emerged from with no memories. During Eugenia's long periods of melancholy, the girl climbed into her bed and caressed her like a lover until the sobbing was exhausted. "What a sad life Dona Eugenia has! She is more a slave than I am because she can't escape her terrors," Tete once commented to Tante Rose. The healer knew all too well Tete's dreams of running away, because she'd had to stop her several times, but for a year or two now the girl had seemed resigned to her fate, and had not again mentioned the idea of escaping.

Tete was the first to realize that her mistress's crises coincided with the summons of the drums on nights of the kalenda, when the slaves gathered to dance. Those kalendas often evolved into voodoo ceremonies, which were forbidden, but Cambray and the commandeurs did not attempt to prevent them because they were afraid of the supernatural powers of the mambo, Tante Rose. To Eugenia the drums announced specters, witchcraft, and curses; all her misfortunes were the fault of the voodoo. Dr. Parmentier had explained in vain that voodoo was not a hair-raising practice, it was a grouping of beliefs and rituals like those of any religion, including Catholicism, and very necessary because it gave a sense of meaning to the miserable existence of the slaves. "Heretic! He must be French, to compare the holy faith of Christ with the superstitions of these savages," Eugenia clamored. For Valmorain, a rationalist and atheist, the blacks' trances were in the same category as his wife's rosaries, and in principle he had no objection to either. He tolerated with the same equanimity voodoo ceremonies and the masses performed by the priests who stopped by the plantation, drawn by the excellent rum of its distillery. Africans were baptized en masse as soon as they disembarked in the port, as demanded by the Code Noir, but their contact with Christianity went no further than that, or than the hasty masses conducted by itinerant priests. It was Toulouse Valmorain's opinion that if voodoo consoled the blacks, there was no reason to prohibit it.

In view of Eugenia's inexorable deterioration, her husband wanted to take her to Cuba, to see if the change of atmosphere would alleviate her condition, but his brother-in-law Sancho explained by letter that the good names of the Valmorains and the Garcia del Solars were at risk. Discretion above all. It would be detrimental to both their businesses if his sister's madness became a topic for comment. In passing he told Valmorain how embarrassed he was that he had let him marry a woman who went berserk. In all honesty he hadn't suspected it, his sister had never showed perturbing symptoms in the convent, and when they sent her to him, she seemed normal, if a little dim. He had not thought of the family antecedents. How could he have imagined that his grandmother's religious melancholy and the delirious hysteria of his mother were hereditary? Toulouse Valmorain ignored his brother-in-law's warning and took the sick woman to Havana, where he left her in the nuns' care for eight months. During that time Eugenia never mentioned her husband, but she often asked after Tete, who had been left at Saint-Lazare. In the peace and silence of the convent she grew calm, and when her husband came to fetch her, he found her much saner and more content. Once she was back in Saint-Domingue, that good health lasted only briefly. Soon she was pregnant again; the drama of losing the child was repeated, and again she was saved from death by the intervention of Tante Rose.