Читать книгу Lydia Bailey - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 17

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At King Dick’s table that night, I had my first experience of bachamelle, which is salted codfish cooked in the Haitian manner—boned and stewed with potatoes, pimentos, oil, garlic, and butter, and the whole thickened with manioc flour, which is like oatmeal. Every Haitian, man, woman, and child, King Dick said, would eat bachamelle or some similar preparation of salt codfish for breakfast, dinner, and supper every day in the week, if given the chance. I thought at first he was exaggerating, but I know different now; and I never see or smell a salt codfish that all Haiti doesn’t rise before me, and quick memories of black faces, endless green forests, heaps of dead black men and women, glaring blue skies, and the warty black toad-face of the part-devil, part-soldier whom I hated more than any man, bar two, that I have ever known.

We washed down our bachamelle with rum and coconut milk, which moved King Dick to explain to me his matrimonial situation.

“I not permanent married to Cloryphène or Aspodelle or Amétiste or those others,” he said. “They just here on trial for good reasons, mostly helpful ones.”

He flapped a hand at the swarms of flies that had seemingly been attracted from every part of Haiti by the pungent odor of the bachamelle; then checked his wives’ names upon his fingers.

“Amétiste, she play spinet; Roséïde, she stomach-dance, very excetticating; Cloryphène, she got nice legs; Marméline, she make dress just like Paris; Claircine, she expert at loving; Atténaire, she know Voodoo; Floréal and Aspodelle, they just extra, in case of visitors.”

Again I thought he was exaggerating; but when, after dinner, we went back into the big central room, I found he’d been understating.

The room, empty and barn-like when we left it, now vibrated with life and color, for eight women had entered it, attended by numerous small, barefooted black boys.

These women ranged in complexion from pale yellow to darkest stove-lid; and their satin gowns, heavily puffed at the shoulder and extremely low both back and front, also differed widely in color—red, blue, green, yellow, orange, violet, gray, and white. The black boys who stared pop-eyed from behind the ladies’ skirts wore long coats made of the same material as the gowns of their mistresses.

Those dark-skinned women had shown almost a genius for selecting inappropriate colors. The blackest of them, whom I guessed to be Amétiste, since she sat on the spinet-bench looking dreamily into space and tinkling the keys, had a swollen rotundity that made me wonder how she could seat herself without splitting her gown at seat and breast. Her dress was white; her massive arms and bosom, emerging from the gleaming satin, were a glistening black, as solid-looking as polished ebony.

The others were younger, and their figures, in satin gowns that clung to them like sheaths of wet silk, were beautiful. Their flesh-tones, however—doubtless because the colors of their gowns were badly chosen—seemed tinged with bluish green, as though they hovered on the verge of seasickness.

Two, as we entered, were contending for the same chair. One, clad in yellow, bunted with her buttocks at one in blue. The bunt brought the blue girl to her knees, but only for a moment. She rose screaming, hurled herself at her yellow-clad rival, and made a partly successful attempt to tear the yellow satin from her upper body. There was a babel of squealing, and both women fell to the floor and thrashed around, on which the little black boys squalled too, and the room became a maelstrom of turbulent sound and color.

“Hoy, hoy!” King Dick shouted. “Don’t I tell you no fighting?”

Bearing down upon the battle, he separated the combatants with a double sweep of a long arm. They slid across the floor, one bringing up against a leg of the spinet with a crash, the other sliding head-first into the wall with such force that her towering headdress was pressed down around her ears.

They got to their feet, rearranging their gowns with those downward-pushing gestures common to Pharaoh’s daughters and to all women since; and at once they and all the others were languid and elegant, as though no excitement had ever entered their lives.

King Dick, in a rage, burst into an oration directed partly at his wives and partly at me. “Eight wives and can’t get nothing done right! Ask pork for supper, what I get? I get coubouyon! Ask peace and quiet, what I get? I get bellering and yellering! Now listen what I say! Don’t fight around where I taking my ledger! If you got to fight, fight outside and keep on till somebody wins permanent! Next time two of you gets fighting in here, I wipe everybody! Everybody get wiped—Marméline, Cloryphène, Amétiste, Roséïde, Claircine, Aspodelle, Floréal, Atténaire—all get wiped good! Now get along out before I wipe someone just for luck.”

The eight ladies moved from the room droopingly but rapidly.

King Dick threw himself into a chair beside a table on which rested three bottles of rum and a pitcher of cloudy coconut milk. “They like all women,” he said gloomily. “When I want ’em look nice and elegant, so you can pick out a good one for yourself, they fight. You got one picked?”

“Well,” I said, “to tell you the truth——”

King Dick made an airy gesture. “Take one blind, why don’t you? They all good, except maybe Amétiste. Amétiste, she a Nangola, and Nangolas got pretty strong smell, even to me.”

I told him I appreciated his generosity, but felt I should start at once on the task before me.

He drained his glass and instantly refilled it. “You don’t like ’em,” he said, and I thought he spoke accusingly.

“I’ve implied nothing of the sort,” I said. “I—I think your wives are charming. Possibly New Englanders are not so free—that is to say, our upbringing—I mean, our ideas of hospitality——”

King Dick filled his glass for the third time. “That all right,” he said. “I’m sick of ’em myself. I had too much of their myze.”

I found the word baffling, and said so.

“ ’MI, ’mI,” King Dick explained patiently. “They pretty near ’mI me to death: where ’mI going, who ’mI going with, how long ’mI going to stay, when ’mI coming home, what ’mI going to do when I get there! My goo’ness me, no! Can’t stand asky-nasky women, always asking-nasking!”

He held up a rum bottle. Finding it empty, he lifted the lid of the spinet, dropped the bottle on the strings; then got to his feet and walked out onto the broad veranda with the silent smoothness of a big cat. He was an imposing figure, outlined against the night sky and the far-off lights of Cap François, cocking his ear to the throbbing of the drums.

“Little drum, medium drum, big drum,” he said. “Hoy! Time we go Humfort and see what those Gangans finding out.”