Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
That was almost exactly my mental vision, though perhaps Baudelaire's heroine was a little too tall, too
svelte. Comme une chasseresse …. I felt that was too athletic to tally exactly with the image that already
existed in my mind; but the general lines, and above all the ambiance , were exactly right.
We had spent the morning visiting a sugar refinery belonging to a close relation of Raoul's at Basse
Pointe. It was an enormous affair, full of great boilers and ladders and furlongs of piping and tanks brim-
ming with molasses and huge vats of rum, and tubes that emptied brown and white sugar into sacks.
Negroes unloaded sheaves of green sugar-cane from carts and carried them indoors on their heads and
flung them on belts; and the belts ferried them to the first stage of destruction. Our host explained
everything and his wife entertained us between this more technical talk with stories of village life, and a
Negro called Gentilien gave us various samples to taste. Luncheon afterwards had been another of those
milestones in Antillean gastronomy: roast sucking pig, which is a great island favourite, cooked on a
barbecue in the open; and chou palmiste . Heart-of-palm—called, in the French islands, chou palmiste or
chou coco , depending on the tree of its origin—is a delicious vegetable of which the taste is indefinable;
'vegetable,' in fact, seems almost too ignoble a name for anything as rare or delicate as this. The texture
is that of ivory, and one meal of this astonishing food involves the immolation of an entire tree. The palm
is felled and split open by skilful cutlass-blows just below the beginning of the leaves; then, with the
same care that would be observed in the handling of a codex, the precious parcel of the core is slid from
the trunk.
We were sitting in rocking chairs in a cool white room whose arches framed a prospect of tropical
trees. A black girl put the coffee things on a table and pattered away.
Our hostess was a great beauty. She had lustrous black hair parted in the middle, a complexion like a
camellia-petal, and her violet eyes, which seemed to devour the rest of her face, possessed all the lumin-
osity and depth of a heroine of the Romantic era. She talked and laughed in a warm, singing and fluttering
voice, bringing her long and tapering hands into play with an almost Iberian flexibility and precision.
Listening to her conversation with its charming Antillean vowels and the Créole omission of the letter
'R,' I realized, all at once, that it was she, la dame créole , and a very rare and perfect specimen. Nothing
was lacking. The colouring, the alternation between lassitude and gaiety, the gestures, the shady trees,
even the Incroyable accent. ' Si vous alliez, Madame ,' I repeated slowly (but under my breath),
' au vrai pays de gloire
Sur les bords de la Seine ou de la verte Loire ,
Belle digne d'orner les antiques manoirs ,
Vous feriez, à l'abri des ombreuses retraites ,
Germer mille sonnets dans le coeur des poëtes ,
Que vos grands yeux rendraient plus soumis
que vos noirs ,'
or rather, would have repeated, if I could have remembered it by heart.
An old colonial road followed the coast in a cobbled switchback, down into combe after combe, clam-
bering up between them on to thickly wooded headlands and finally running level for miles high in the
air along the lip of a cliff. Peering down through the overhanging network of forest, we could see the
Atlantic breaking far below in long and sluggish scrolls.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search