Parmentier rented a two story house in a barrio for whites and used the first floor as an office and the second for his living quarters. No one knew that he spent his nights several blocks away in a little cobalt blue house. He saw Violette Boisier on Sundays at Adele's. The woman was a very well preserved thirty-eight and in the community of emigres had the reputation of being a virtuous widow. If someone thought he recognized in her a famous cocotte of Le Cap, he immediately discarded that idea as an impossibility. Violette always wore the ring with the broken opal, and there was not a single day she didn't think of Etienne Relais.
None of them had been successful in adapting, and now, several years later, they were just as much foreigners as they'd been on the first day, with the added aggravation that the Cubans' resentment of the refugees had become worse as their numbers grew; they were no longer the wealthy grands blancs but ruined people who clustered in barrios where crime and illness fermented. No one liked them. The Spanish authorities harassed them and strewed their paths with legal obstacles, hoping they would succeed in sending them off forever.
A governmental decree annulled any professional license that had not been obtained in Spain, and Parmentier found himself practicing medicine illegally. The parchment with the royal seal of France had no value, and under those conditions he could treat only slaves and poor who rarely were able to pay him. Another difficulty was that he had not learned a single word of Spanish, unlike Adele and his children, who spoke it at top speed with a Cuban accent.
For her part, Violette finally yielded to Loula's pressure and was on the verge of marrying a sixtyish Galician hotel owner, rich and in ill health, perfect according to Loula because he would soon be gone of a natural death, or with a little aid on her part, and leave them well set. The hotel owner, maddened by that late-in-life love, did not try to clarify rumors that Violette wasn't white because it didn't matter to him. He had never loved anyone as he did that voluptuous woman, and when finally he had her in his arms, he discovered that she provoked in him a senseless grandfatherly tenderness that was comfortable to her because it did not compete with the memory of Etienne Relais. The Galician opened his purse, and she could have spent like a sultana, had she wished, but he had forgotten to mention one thing: he was married. His wife had remained in Spain with their only son, a Dominican priest, and neither of them had any interest in that man whom they hadn't seen in twenty-seven years. Mother and son supposed that he was living in mortal sin, pleasuring himself with fat-assed women in the depraved colonies of the Caribbean, but as long as he sent them money regularly they were not concerned with the state of his soul. This suitor believed that if he married the widow Relais his family would never hear of it, and he would have done so had it not been for the intervention of a greedy lawyer who learned about his past and proposed to reap a good harvest. The Galician realized that he could not buy the lawyer's silence, and that the blackmail would be repeated a thousand times. An epistolary battle was begun, and a few months later the son unexpectedly appeared, prepared to save his father from the claws of Satan and the inheritance from the claws of the harlot. Violette, advised by Parmentier, backed out of the marriage, although she continued to visit her lover from time to time so he would not die of sorrow.
That year Jean-Martin turned thirteen, and for five years had been saying that he was going to follow a military career in France, as his father had. Proud and stubborn, as he had always been, he refused to listen to the arguments of Violette, who did not want to be parted from him and who had a horror of the army, where a boy as handsome as he could end up sodomized by a sergeant. Jean-Martin's insistence was so unshakable that finally his mother had to yield. She used her friendship with a ship captain she had known in Le Cap to get him to France. There he was welcomed by a brother of Etienne Relais, also a military man, who took him to the Paris school for cadets in which all the men of his family had been formed. He knew that his brother had married an Antillean woman and so was not surprised by the boy's color; he would not be the only one of mixed blood in the academy.
Considering that the situation in Cuba was continuously growing worse for refugees, Dr. Parmentier decided to test his fortune in New Orleans, and if things went well, he would send for his family later. Then, for the first time in the eighteen years they had been together, Adele spoke up and stated that they would not be separated again; they would all go together, or no one would go. She was prepared to continue to live a clandestine life, hidden, like the sin of the man she loved, but she would not allow her family to be torn apart. She proposed that they travel on the same ship, she and the children in third class, and that they debark separately, so that no one would see them together. She herself got passports, after bribing the proper authorities, as was the usual custom, and proving that she was free and could support her children with her work. She was not going to New Orleans to ask for charity, she told the consul with her characteristic smoothness, but to be a seamstress.
When Violette Boisier learned that her friends were planning to emigrate for the second time, she exploded in a fit of rage and weeping, something that had often happened when she was young but not in recent years. She felt betrayed by Adele.
"How can you follow that man who does not recognize you as the mother of his children?" she sobbed.
"He loves me the best he can," Adele replied, without anger.
"He has taught his children to pretend in public that they don't know him!" Violette exclaimed.
"But he supports them, educates them, and loves them very much. He is a good father. My life is bound to his, Violette, and we are not going to be apart again."
"And me? What's to become of me here alone?" Violette asked her, disconsolate.
"You could come with us," her friend suggested.
That idea seemed splendid to Violette. She had heard that there was a flourishing society of free people of color in New Orleans, where all of them could prosper. Without losing a minute, she consulted with Loula, and they both agreed that nothing was holding them in Cuba. New Orleans would be their last chance to put down roots and make plans for their old age.
Toulouse Valmorain, who had by means of sporadic letters kept in touch with Parmentier during those seven years, offered him his aid and hospitality, but he warned that there were more physicians in New Orleans than bakers, and the competition would be strong. Fortunately Parmentier's French royal license would be good in Louisiana. "And here," he added in his letter, "you won't have to speak Spanish, my most esteemed friend, because the language is French." Parmentier descended from the ship and fell into the embrace of his friend, who was waiting on the dock. They hadn't seen each other since 1793. Valmorain did not remember his friend being so small and fragile, and in turn Parmentier did not remember Valmorain that rotund. Valmorain had a new air of satisfaction; there was no trace of the tormented man with whom he'd had those interminable philosophical and political discussions in Saint-Domingue.
While the rest of the passengers debarked, they waited for the luggage. Valmorain did not notice Adele at all, a dark mulatta with two boys and a girl, who was attempting to hire a cart to transport her bundles, but he did notice among the crowd a woman wearing a handsome vermilion travel suit with a hat, bag, and gloves of the same color, so beautiful it would have been impossible not to notice her. He recognized her immediately, although that was the last place he expected to see her. He shouted out her name and ran to greet her with a boyish enthusiasm. "Monsieur Valmorain, what a surprise!" Violette Boisier exclaimed, holding out a gloved hand, but he put his hands on her shoulders and planted three kisses on her face, in the French style. He found, enchanted, that Violette had changed very little, and that the years had made her even more desirable. She told him in a few words that she was widowed, and that Jean-Martin was studying in France. Valmorain did not remember who that Jean-Martin was, but when he learned that she'd come alone, he was overcome by his youthful desires. His farewell words, "I hope you will allow me the honor of visiting you," were spoken in the intimate tone he hadn't used with her for a decade. They were interrupted at that instant by Loula, who was cursing at a pair of porters to get them to carry their trunks. "The rules haven't changed," she told him, elbowing him aside; "you will have to get in line if you plan to be received by madame."