At that same hour, in Tante Rose's cabin, Seraphine died alone, unaware because she was sleeping. This is how it was.

The Concubine

They named the boy Maurice. His father was shaken to his boots by that unexpected gift from heaven, which had come to combat his loneliness and stir his ambition. That child was going to carry on the Valmorain dynasty. The master declared a feast day; no one on the plantation worked. He had a number of animals roasted, and assigned three helpers to Tante Mathilde so there would be no shortage of spicy corn dishes and vegetables and cakes for everyone. He gave permission to have a kalenda in the main patio in front of the big house, which soon filled with a noisy crowd. The slaves adorned themselves with what little they had-a colored rag, a necklace of shells, a flower. They brought their drums and other improvised instruments, and after a bit there was music and people were dancing under the mocking gaze of Cambray. The master had two barrels of taffia distributed, and every slave received a generous dose in his gourd for a toast. Tete appeared in the gallery with the baby wrapped in a mantilla, and the father took him and lifted him over his head to show to the slaves. "This is my heir! He will be called Maurice Valmorain, that is my father's name!" he exclaimed, hoarse with emotion and still hungover from his drunkenness the night before. A silence like the depths of the sea greeted his words. Even Cambray was startled. This ignorant white man had committed the incredible blunder of giving his son the name of a deceased grandfather, who on being summoned could rise from his grave and kidnap his grandson and take him back with him to the world of the dead. Valmorain believed that the silence was respect, and ordered a second round of taffia and a continuation of the rejoicing. Tete took back the newborn and rushed away with him, sprinkling his face with a rain of saliva to protect him from the disgrace invoked by his father's rashness.

The next day, when the domestic slaves had cleaned the refuse from the patio and the others had gone back to the cane fields, Dr. Parmentier quickly prepared to go back to the city. Little Maurice was suckling like a calf at his wet nurse's breast, and Eugenia was showing no symptoms of fatal womb fever. Tete had rubbed her breasts with a mixture of honey and butter and bandaged them with a red cloth, Tante Rose's method for drying up milk before it began to flow. On Eugenia's night table she lined up the vials of drops for sleep, the cachets for pain, and syrups for enduring fear, not to heal her, as the doctor himself admitted, but to ease her existence. The Spanish woman was a shadow of ashen skin and ravaged face, more from tincture of opium than from her deranged mind. Maurice had suffered the effects of the drug in his mother's womb, the physician explained to Valmorain, which was why he had been born so small and frail; he would be sickly and needed air, sun, and good nourishment. He ordered them to give three raw eggs a day to the wet nurse to fortify her milk. "Now your mistress and the baby are both in your care, Tete. They could not be in better hands," he added. Toulouse Valmorain paid the doctor generously for his services and bade him farewell with regret, for he truly esteemed the cultivated, good-natured man with whom he had enjoyed countless card games in the long evenings of Saint-Lazare. He would miss the conversations with him, especially those in which they were not in agreement, because that forced him to exercise the forgotten art of arguing for pleasure. He chose two armed commandeurs to accompany the physician to Le Cap.

Parmentier was packing, a task he did not delegate to slaves, being very meticulous about his possessions, when Tete rapped discreetly at his door and asked in a thread of a voice if she might have a word with him in private. Parmentier had been with her often; he used her to communicate with Eugenia, who seemed to have forgotten her French, and with the slaves, especially Tante Rose. "You are a very good nurse, Tete, but do not treat your mistress like an invalid, she has to learn to take care of herself," he advised her when he saw her spooning pap into Eugenia's mouth and learned that Tete set her on the chamber pot and wiped her nether regions so she would not soil herself when she stood up. The girl always answered his questions with precision, in correct French, but she never initiated a dialogue or looked him in the eye, which had allowed him to observe her at his pleasure. She must be about seventeen, he thought, though her body was more like that of a woman than an adolescent. Valmorain had told him Tete's story on one of the hunting trips they made together. He knew that the slave's mother had been pregnant when she arrived at the island and was bought by an affranchi, a man who had a horse trade in Le Cap. The woman attempted to provoke a miscarriage, but what she got were more lashes than anyone else in her state could have borne; the little one in her womb, however, was tenacious and in due time was born healthy. As soon as the mother could stand, she tried to smash the baby's head against the floor, but she was grabbed from her in time. Another slave took care of the newborn child for several weeks, until their owner decided to use her to pay a gambling debt to a French official named Pascal, but the mother never learned of it because she had thrown herself into the ocean from a cliff. Valmorain told Parmentier that he had bought Tete to be a personal maid for his wife and had come out well rewarded, as the girl had become both nurse and housekeeper. Apparently now she would also be Maurice's nursemaid.

"What is it, Tete?" the doctor asked, as he carefully placed his valuable silver and bronze instruments into a polished wood case.

She closed the door, and with a minimum of words and no expression on her face, told him she had a son a little more than a year old, whom she had seen for an instant when he was born. Parmentier thought her voice was breaking, but when she continued, explaining that she had the baby while her mistress was resting in a convent in Cuba, she spoke in the same neutral tone as before.

"My maitre has forbidden me to mention the child. Dona Eugenia knows nothing about it," Tete concluded.

"Monsieur Valmorain did the right thing. His wife had not been able to have children and was very upset when she saw them. Does anyone know about your baby?"

"Only Tante Rose. I think the head overseer, Monsieur Cambray, suspects but has not been able to confirm it."

"Now that madame has her own baby, the situation has changed. Surely your master will want you to get your child back, Tete. After all, it is his property, no?" Parmentier commented.

"Yes, it is his property. It is also his son."

Why hadn't the most obvious thing occurred to me? the doctor thought. He had not glimpsed the least sign of intimacy between Valmorain and the slave girl, but it was easy to conjecture that with a wife like his, a man would console himself with any woman within reach. Tete was very attractive, there was something enigmatic and sensual about her. Such women were gems that only a trained eye would pick from among the stones, he thought, closed boxes that the lover must open little by little to reveal their mysteries. Any man could feel very fortunate to have their affection, but he doubted that Valmorain knew how to appreciate this girl. He thought of his Adele with nostalgia. She too had been a diamond in the rough. She had given him three children and many years of companionship, so discreetly that he never had to give explanations to the mean-minded society in which he practiced his science. If it had been known that he had a concubine and children of color, whites would have repudiated him; instead they had accepted without question the rumors that he was a sodomite, and that was why he remained a bachelor and frequently disappeared into the barrios of the affranchis, where pimps offered young boys for every taste. Because of his love for Adele and the children, he could not go back to France, however desperate he was on the island. "So little Maurice has a brother… In my profession you learn everything," Parmentier muttered to himself. Valmorain had sent his wife to Cuba not to recover her health, as had been announced at the time, but to hide from her what was happening in her own house. Why so fastidious? It was a common, and accepted, situation; the island was filled with bastards of mixed blood, and he thought he had noticed a couple of little mulattoes among the Saint-Lazare slaves. The only explanation was that Eugenia could not have endured the knowledge that her husband had bedded Tete, her one anchor in the profound confusion of her madness. Valmorain must have divined that Tete's pregnancy would have been the nail in his wife's coffin, and he was not cynical enough to accept that his wife would be better off dead. Finally, the physician decided, it wasn't his concern. Valmorain must have had his reasons and it was not up to him to inquire what they were, but he was intrigued to know whether he had sold Tete's baby or was just raising it away from the plantation for a prudent period of time.