The Restless. Gerty Dambury

we were. I have to work at remembering. Maybe he took the dinghy that used to ferry people between Bouillante and La Pointe. Maybe we should imagine some old white guy giving him a ride because his mother was in service to him, or maybe it was his auntie who was the servant, or a neighbor who dared ask the guy for a favor, just a tanprisouplé, whispering a little prayer to secure the car. “For Pointe-à-Pitre, sir. He’s a very good boy, very serious.”

      Yes, I think that’s it. The father came to town in a car, seated to the right of an old man with his mustache and ivory-colored hat, in an old black jalopy that couldn’t go more than thirty kilometers an hour and that, chugging along, took its time on the road, apparently admiring the placid mountains right after Capesterre. Yes, I see him there, seated in a motorcar that spluttered its way to Goyave, barely pulled itself together in Petit-Bourg, and slowly picked up speed before chewing up the last flat kilometers from Baie-Mahault onwards.

      That’s how we saw him come to town.

      A prince come up to the capital . . . He already had the look.

      One day we saw him arrive in the commune of Les Abymes, the outer ring, our outskirts, a cesspit unashamed of its canal—that dirty stream between the grass and the sidewalk, covered by a succession of blackened planks thrown here and there to form a bridge over the brackish, stinking water.

      I was sixty-eight years old at the time; he was maybe twenty-four. I could’ve been his grandmother, because in those days we already had children when we were fourteen or sixteen. Even if I’d had a child at eighteen and my child had followed suit, I would’ve still been a grandmother.

      Yeah, I could’ve been his grandma, and I was one of the first to greet him when he showed up from nowhere. Really from nowhere, because back then Bouillante was a backwater, with only woods and thickets. And why am I saying “back then”! Even today, in the year of our Lord 1967, Bouillante is still the place where dogs bark out their asses.

      Even worse, Emmanuel came out of the Bouillantine woods—the forest of the forest, you might say. No running water and no electricity, just a river below the house and oil lamps—but we don’t need to go over all that. It’s old news. He showed up from nowhere with the clear intention of becoming the greatest fashion designer in Guadeloupe, a kind of Jean Patou, the man who created Joy, “the most expensive perfume in the world.”

      That’s what the advertisements claimed, and everybody was speaking about Patou, the fashion designer who’d become a perfume maker. The child’s father imagined himself climbing the ranks, from suburban tailor to fashion designer, finally with his place in the sun. He saw himself in his workshop helping great ladies choose what they wanted from his collection, all of it archived in a huge catalog.

      And though he changed professions, he was never able to completely rid himself of the vestiges of his dream of becoming a great fashion designer. You know, under the staircase, only a few feet from where the little girl is waiting on that bench, lie hundreds of notebooks, samples of cloth the father still prides himself on. The mother yells at him almost every day about the mess under there.

      The mother: “It’s attracting mice. The little nasties are having a wild party in your samples.”

      The father: “Which just goes to show you, it’s only mice who understand me.”

      It can go on like that for hours. Then the mother tries to throw all his sample books (which, it’s true, stink of mold) into a big box, and her husband lunges at her, violently pushing her away in order to protect the precious cloth he stacks by category and in alphabetical order: alpaca, Bedford cord, cashmere, chenille, cotton . . . The mother clutches a pail of cold water, adding in several capfuls of bleach. Donegal tweed, drill, felt . . . He’s sitting on the ground, his samples between his legs. He holds the cloth between two fingers, weighing it, considering its quality, caressing it.

      Flannel, gabardine, Harris Tweed, linen (sheer), madras . . . She takes a step forward, empties the pail on the ground, and manages to soak his behind. He doesn’t move.

      Mattress ticking, military cloth, moleskin, nylon, percale, pinstripe, poplin . . . She seizes a broom and energetically sweeps the floor, hitting him every time the broom gets too close. She sweats; her upper arms flap a little (she’s already forty-five years old).

      Tailor’s cloth, tweed, velvet, quilted velvet, Vichy fabric, wool . . . He lines up his sample books against the wall, packs them together so they won’t tumble down, turns around, and viciously pushes his wife away before hiking up the pants that have fallen to his hips. Then he leaves.

      His wife mutters complaints; the children laugh.

      This scene plays out pretty often, but he does lose from time to time because, knowing almost everything about him and his ambition, his wife is skilled at hurling the most personal of insults.

      He can’t stand it when she calls him “a fake Patou, a loser.”

      When Émilienne’s father arrived in La Pointe in 1936, Jean Patou had just died of apoplexy. It’s strange, isn’t it? One moment a person is talking to you, and a second later, everything stops in his head and he dies, or everything slows down: thought processes, gestures, speech.

      Anyway, Patou was the father’s inspiration, a kind of distant relation—at least that’s what he claimed.

      The truth is, Patou had served with the Zouaves during World War I, while Emmanuel’s uncle, Lord knows why, was stationed in the Dardanelles with the Allied Army of the Orient. The two men ran into each other there, and Patou, a captain, couldn’t stop talking about what he wanted to do once the war was over: he would dive into fashion, women’s clothing, haute couture. “You mustn’t be afraid to act.” When you’ve come so close to death, you can’t waste time by hesitating.

      In short, the uncle was captivated. So the day when the first creations of the man who was to become Emmanuel’s “mentor” began to appear in magazines like Madame, the uncle—what was his name?—was proud to tell his nephew (the only boy in that whole pack of kids, and his boy too because he had no children) that Jean Patou was ALSO HIS UNCLE. He never stopped saying it: “When you have such a celebrated relative, you can’t waste away in the forests of La Côte-Sous-le-Vent. By God, I tell you, dear nephew, Pointe-à-Pitre is yours for the taking!”

      In 1936 the nephew decides to relocate to the big city. He’s learned to sew from a modest tailor in the village of Bouillante. He has talent, a lot of talent, and that same year, Jean Patou suffocates and dies.

      The uncle and the nephew interpret “Uncle” Jean Patou’s death as a sign for his disciple from afar to rise up and take his place. So there Emmanuel is, arriving in La Pointe dressed just like Patou: suit, hat—and if he’d dared, a cane, too, and even three-pieces. But you have to admit that, in Bouillante, it’s a little too hot for a jacket and a vest.

      8.

      The cake isn’t cooked enough. The middle is soggy, too heavy.

      Sylvine murmurs, “It’s a doucoune. We can’t eat it.” Everybody giggles.

      It’s not the right moment for a soggy cake. We can’t appreciate it at all; we’re too miserable. You can eat almost anything with a little joy in your heart. Just sprinkle a little joy on anything that’s bitter or tasteless. (That’s what you always say, Papa, especially when Mama gives us magnesium salts to clean us out.) But there’s nothing to be done for that disgusting cake. It’s too late to sprinkle anything on it.

      We nibble on the edges of our pieces of cake and then throw what’s left back on the tray. And we wait for the bell. Nobody speaks. We keep our arms crossed on our desks, like when we’re being punished. Our book bags are on the floor; the prizes are on our desks, next to