A date with Black Venus

You want to touch it, hein? I've felt you staring this past hour, pretending to drink your tea, taking a big slurp now and then to let me know you're still there.

It’s hard to resist getting obsessed, the way she shimmers like silk. Go on cher, stroke that little black cat. Her ears are soft. She’ll lick the salt right off your palms.

She loves to curl up between my legs and just sun herself here by the window, hearing the hawkers’ banter in the street below, the slops thrown, the clatter of wheels. When you rang my bell and ran up those five flights of stairs and flung down breathless... Well, I knew you must have guessed my chatte’s the best in Paris. It’s no secret. I could make a mint just showing her to people, raising my skirt for a second. Then dropping it, letting them throw gold in my lap before I do anything more.

But for you? You seem so nice. Don’t even talk much. Just sit there breathing. And sometimes slurp your tea. For you, I won’t charge a single franc.

Baudelaire? You'd like to hear more about him? Ah. Sometimes people want that too.

You know he called me his Vénus Noire? And there are poems he wrote about me that some people still read. Maybe you do too...you're some sort of student...or worse, a critic. I never much cared for his work. He could take an easy thing like sex and tangle it up until it was hard to grasp as physics. Or he'd get hold of a tricky idea like love and made it simple and ugly as dirt. Just like all writers, hein? You know, I wasn't much more than a scent to him sometimes. Or a pair of tits. Or a head of hair. A metaphor.

And I’ll tell you something else about Charles Baudelaire...

Come over here. Feel those chancres on my upper thigh? Those weren’t there before him. One night with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury, they say. I know how it works. You think just because I’m blind that I can’t think straight?

I’ve got my wits about me! Like this old shawl gathered up around my hips. Pretty, isn’t it? So many patches of colour sewn up together. When the world began to fade, I couldn’t stand to look out at the sunshine. So I watched this shawl more every day. Starting with an hour or two figuring out how red bleeds into mauve. Then an afternoon skipping between green and blue and dusky plum coloured squares. A whole evening just looking at yellow shining. Put your hand on it, right there. Yes, because yellow has a nubbier feel, I can tell which one it is.

After it got dark, the only colours I had were in my head. Some days I sit here, smoking, remembering. I think about the time I met Charles in Port au Prince. I was only a child. And him the funny white man hopping between candy-striped awnings hung with shade, afraid of the liquid sky above him. Not wanting the sun to hit his pale face. I tell you, it made him look like a boiled crab when it caught him!

I was fifteen, I think. I coiffed the ladies on Sundays before church, smoothing their oiled curls into chignons, feeling the memories sleeping in those heads of hair. My fingers working fast, mouth full of pins, the sweat gathering in the seams of my cheap dress. He came in a fine white suit, sat and watched me sweep cuttings and stretch to pick up hairs between floorboards.

And the way he looked at me – like he saw flames coming up inside me. Like you’re doing now, eh? Well, I didn’t know anything. That’s how I ended up here.

My heart bursts when I think of being back there. Back on my lazy island where the mangoes twist cool and ripe into your hand and tamarinds scent the boatman’s song. In the evening. In the autumn. When the harbour opens like a lover’s arms and fills with sails. Then I could see. I could walk.

But that must be a dream. I smell only the mouse-traps of Appartement Six, Rue de la Femme-sans-tête.

You’re leaving so soon? You didn’t even finish your tea.

Ah well. Come visit any time.

Jeanne Duval was a Haitian-born actress and dancer of mixed French and black African ancestry. For 20 years, she was the muse of French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire. They met in 1842, when Duval left Haiti for France, and the two remained together, albeit stormily, for the next two decades. Duval is said to have been the woman whom Baudelaire loved most in his life, after his mother. Some sources say Duval died of syphilis in 1862, and Baudelaire died five years later, also of syphilis. Others claim that Duval survived Baudelaire, that she was seen last in 1870 — blind and on crutches, suffering heavily from syphilis.

from Wikipedia