Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende Page B

did she offer them a seat, because she had only the one chair. It was difficult to calculate her age; her face was young but her body was mangled. Her arms were slim and strong, her breasts hung like papayas beneath her shift, her skin was very dark, her nose straight and broad at the base, her lips well delineated, and her gaze intense. The kerchief around her head covered an abundant mass of hair that had never been cut and was divided into hard, crimped curls like sisal rope. A cart had run over one of her legs when she was fourteen, breaking several bones that healed badly; that was what caused her to walk with such difficulty, supporting herself on the walking stick a grateful slave had carved for her. Tante Rose considered the accident a stroke of luck, for it freed her from the cane fields. Another injured slave would have ended up stirring boilingmolasses or washing clothes in the river, she was the exception, for from the time she was very young the loas had chosen her to be a mambo . Parmentier had never seen her in a ceremony, but he could imagine her in a trance, transformed. In voodoo all were officiants and could experience the divinity of being mounted by the loas ; the role of the houngan or the mambo consisted solely of preparing the hounfor for the ceremony. Valmorain had expressed to Parmentier his worry that Tante Rose was a charlatan who took advantage of her patients’ ignorance. “What’s important are the results. She is more successful with her methods than I am with mine,” the physician responded.
    Voices of slaves cutting cane came drifting to them from across the fields, all following the same beat. Work began before dawn, as they had to look for forage for the animals and wood for the fires. Then they labored from sunrise to sunset, with a pause of two hours at midday when the sun turned white and the earth sweated. Cambray had attempted to eliminate that rest, which was stipulated by the Code Noir and ignored by most of the planters, but Valmorain thought it necessary. He also gave the slaves one free day a week to tend their vegetables; there was never enough to eat, but they had more than on some plantations, where survival was based on what the slaves grew in their gardens. Tété had heard about a reform of the Code Noir—three free days a week and abolition of the whip—but she had also heard that no colonial would adopt that law in the hypothetical case the king approved it. Who was going to work for another person without a whip? The doctor could not make out the words of the slaves’ song. He had spent many years on the island and had become accustomed to hearing the Creole spoken in the city, a language derived from French, jerky and marked by an African rhythm, but the Creole of the plantations was incomprehensible to him; the slaves had changed it into a tongue in a code that excluded whites, and for that reason he needed Tété to translate. He leaned down to examine one of the leaves Tante Rose was pulling from the branch. “What are these good for?” Parmentier asked her. She explained that koulant is for a drummingin the chest, for sounds in the head, for weariness that comes at dusk, and for despair. “Would it help me? My heart is failing,” he said. “Yes, it will help you, because koulant also prevents farts,” she replied, and all three burst out laughing. Just at that moment they heard the sound of a horse approaching at a gallop. It was one of the commandeurs, and he was looking for Tante Rose because there had been an accident at the cane press. “Séraphine put her hand where she shouldn’t have,” he yelled from atop his horse and left immediately, without offering to take the healer. She delicately wrapped the leaves in the cloth and asked Tété to take them inside her cabin. She picked up the pouch she always had ready and set out walking as fast as she could, followed by Tété and the