Prosper Cambray had not managed to impose his law of terror among the household servants; a tacit frontier had been established between Tete's small territory and the rest of the plantation. Her domain was run like a school, and his like a prison. In the house, precise chores were assigned to each slave, who carried them out smoothly and calmly. In the fields people marched in rows under the always ready whips of the commandeurs; they obeyed without a word and lived in a state of alert, for any carelessness was paid for with blood. Cambray charged himself personally with discipline. Valmorain did not lift a hand against the slaves, he considered it degrading, but he attended punishments to establish his authority and to make sure that the overseer did not over-step himself. He never reproached Cambray in public, but his presence at the place of torture imposed a certain restraint. The house and fields were worlds apart, but nonetheless Tete and the overseer did occasionally meet, and then the air was charged with the threatening energy of a storm. Cambray looked for her, excited by the young woman's obvious scorn, and she avoided him, made uneasy by his brazen lust. "If Cambray goes too far with you I want to know it immediately, do you understand me?" Valmorain warned her more than once, but she never went to him; it was not good to provoke the overseer's wrath.
By order of her maitre, who did not tolerate hearing Maurice parler neg, speak like the blacks, Tete always spoke French in the house. She spoke Creole with all the others on the plantation, and with Eugenia the Spanish that was becoming reduced to a few indispensable words. The ill woman had sunk into a melancholy so persistent, and an emotional indifference so complete, that if Tete hadn't fed and washed her she would have died of hunger, filthy as a pig, and if she hadn't moved her and changed her position, her bones would have frozen in place, and if she hadn't urged her to speak, she would have been mute. She no longer suffered panic attacks but spent her days half awake, half asleep in a large chair, eyes staring ahead, like a huge doll. She still recited the rosary, which she always wore in a small leather bag she hung around her neck, even though she could no longer say the words. "When I die you will have my rosary-do not let anyone take it from you, because it is blessed by the pope," she had told Tete. In rare moments of lucidity she prayed for God to take her away. According to Tante Rose, her ti-bon-ange was stuck in this world and needed a special service to liberate it, nothing painful or complicated, but Tete had not decided to take such an irrevocable step. She wanted to help her hapless mistress, but responsibility for her death would be a crushing burden, even shared with Tante Rose. Perhaps Dona Eugenia's ti-bon-ange still needed to do something in her body; they would have to give it time to get free by itself.
Toulouse Valmorain imposed his embraces on Tete frequently, more out of habit than affection or desire, without the urgency of the period when she entered puberty and he was overcome by a sudden passion. Only Eugenia's dementia explained why she had not realized what was happening right before her eyes. "The maitresse suspects, but what is she going to do? She can't stop him," was the opinion of Tante Rose, the one person Tete dared confide in when she became pregnant. She had feared the reaction of her mistress when she began to notice, but before that happened, Valmorain took his wife to Cuba, where he would gladly have left her forever if the convent nuns had agreed to take care of her. When he brought her back to the plantation, Tete's baby had disappeared, and Eugenia never asked why her slave's tears were falling like little pebbles. Valmorain's sensuality was gluttonous and hurried. In bed as at the table he did not like to waste time in preliminaries-just as he was bored by the ritual of long tablecloth and silver candelabra that Eugenia had always used at dinner he found the amorous game equally useless. For Tete it was one further chore, which was fulfilled in a few minutes except on those occasions when the devil possessed her master; that did not often happen, though she always anticipated it with fear. She was grateful for her luck; Lacroix, the owner of the plantation neighboring Saint-Lazare, kept a seraglio of girls chained in a barracks to satisfy his fantasies, in which guests and a few blacks he called "my studs" participated. Valmorain had attended those cruel evenings only once, and was so profoundly affected that he never returned. He was not excessively scrupulous but he believed that sooner or later a man paid for fundamental crimes, and he did not want to be near Lacroix when it was time for him to pay his. He was Lacroix's friend, they had shared interests, from breeding animals to hiring slaves for the cane harvest; he attended his parties, his cattle roundups and cockfights, but he did not want to set foot in that barracks again. Lacroix trusted him completely, with no guarantee but with a simple signed receipt handed Valmorain his savings to deposit in Cuba in a secret account far from the greedy claws of his wife and other relatives. Valmorain had to use great tact to reject Lacroix's repeated invitations to his orgies.
Tete had learned to let herself be used with the passivity of a sheep, her body loose, not offering any resistance, while her mind and soul flew elsewhere; that way her master finished quickly and then fell into the sleep of death. She knew that alcohol was her ally if she poured it in exact measure. With one or two goblets her maitre became excited, with the third she had to be careful because he became violent, but with the fourth he was enveloped in a fog of intoxication, and if she delicately eluded him he fell asleep before he touched her. Valmorain never wondered what she felt in those encounters, just as it would never have occurred to him to ask what his horse felt when he rode it. He was used to her and rarely looked for other women. At times he awoke with faint distress in the empty bed that still held the nearly imperceptible mark of Tete's warm body; then he would remember his long-past nights with Violette Boisier or the love affairs of his youth in France that seemed to have happened to another man, one whose imagination was sent flying at the sight of a female ankle and who was capable of romping with renewed brio. Now that was impossible. Tete did not excite him as she once had, but it did not occur to him to replace her; he was comfortable with her, and he was a man of deeply rooted habits.
Sometimes he trapped a young slave on the fly, but that did not yield much beyond a rape as fast, and not as pleasureful, as reading a page of his current book. He attributed his lack of enthusiasm to an attack of malaria that had nearly dispatched him to the other world, leaving him weakened. Dr. Parmentier warned him about the effects of alcohol, as pernicious in the tropics as fever, but he did not drink too much, he was certain of that, only what was indispensable to palliate boredom and loneliness. He paid no account to Tete's persistence in filling his goblet. Before, when he was still traveling frequently to Le Cap, he used the occasion to divert himself with a fashionable courtesan, one of the beautiful poules who fired his passion but left him feeling empty. On the road he would anticipate pleasures that once consummated he could not remember, in part because during those trips he drank very heavily. He paid those girls to do the same thing he did with Tete-the same rough embrace, the same haste-and in the end he would stumble out with an impression of having been swindled. With Violette it would have been different, but once she started living with Relais, she had left the profession. Valmorain returned to Saint-Lazare earlier than planned, thinking of Maurice and eager to regain the security of his routine. "I am getting old," he muttered, studying himself in the mirror as his slave shaved him, seeing the web of fine wrinkles around his eyes and the beginning of a double chin. He was forty years old, the same age as Prosper Cambray, but he lacked his energy and was putting on weight. "That's the fault of this accursed climate," he added. He felt that his life was passing aimlessly, drifting like a ship without a rudder or compass, waiting for something he did not know how to name.