Martinique - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 41

cended straight from a marriage of those two dances with the abhorred calenda . For the dancing, for
minutes on end, would be precise and almost formal. The two partners held each other in the customary
gesture with considerable gravity. Then they would gradually unite in a clinch which shook and rippled
in time to a new and complicated shuffling of their feet. Seismic waves passed up the legs and trunks
of the dancers, setting their hips and loins and buttocks jerking and gyrating, then pausing for an instant
and unwinding in the opposite direction with a jungly, spasmodic movement that would in a few seconds
have set the room booming with the anathema of Père Labat.
The Select Tango, where Costa and I had made a bachelor descent to catch a glimpse of the Bal
Doudou—an Antillean bal musette frequented by doudous —was a great barnlike place in a back street,
agreeably tropical with its lattice work and wooden balconies and rickety staircases and the Calypso-
like rattle and swing of the biguine band. The bar swarmed with youthful Negroes, and groups of young
Negro women sat at tables, chattering and giggling and pouting. The air was afloat with the soft quacks
and Z-sounds of their conversation as though the room were filled with birds and insects. When one of
them said something funny, all their teeth would be bared at once, as they kicked their feet out and sunk
their heads to the metal table-top in that infectious Negro laughter. They were all violently made up, and
dressed in flaming best clothes that reminded one of little girls' party dresses. Large ear-rings hung in
every lobe, but only one or two wore turbans. The rest were bareheaded; or hatted, for some reason, with
men's trilbies, which they wore severely tilted over their noses. One girl affected a blancoed sun-helmet
several times too big for her.
A friendly cry made us both turn our eyes from the floor. It was Sosthène, whom we had met on the
Colombie . We joined him at a table in the corner, where he was sitting with two Negro friends. He looked
as if he had been moving fast since landing, and had acquired a wonderfully raffish and beachcomber
appearance: several days' beard, tousled hair, crumpled white clothes, jovial and bloodshot eyes. He was
working as a welder in a factory near the docks. He introduced the others—' Mes deux copains, Jacquot
et Charlemagne. C'est des gentils types, très corrects .' Charlemagne, who had been to Swansea and to
U.S. ports in the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans, Galveston and Mobile, spoke, or so I thought, a little
English. His answer to every sentence addressed to him was an enormous display of teeth, a rich chuckle
and the words, 'Well, for heaven's sake!' Then he rolled his head from side to side, and chuckled again.
'Have a drink, Charlemagne?'
'Well, for heaven's sake!'
'Pretty hot in here, eh?'
'Well, for heaven's sake!' and a pregnant chuckle.
'Nice band …'
'Well, for …' etc.
Sosthène was talking about black women. They were a terrible handful. He had already become en-
gaged to two, but had discarded Marie-Thérèse, the first one, in favour of Françoise—' Vous comprenez,
mon cher, elle est plus logique, plus correct, quoi .' I remembered from the ship those two words of his,
which for him were synonymous. Costa was soon biguining across the room with the most expert sinu-
osity, glued to a girl in a straw hat. There was an attractive mahogany-coloured girl at the next table in
great ear-rings and a Madras. I asked the girls who were now sitting on either side of Sosthène what she
was like.
' Qui? la Fwancine? '
' Oui, celle-la .'