The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé

Author:Maryse Condé
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: World Editions
Published: 2022-04-11T14:45:44+00:00

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The Bon Pasteur Hospital was the pride of Caracalla. It was an ultramodern building, which had received a donation from an American couple who admired the Mondongues and bequeathed them a considerable fortune as a legacy. The garden housed some very rare species. Despite the early hour, the hospital was crowded with worried relatives.

Pascal dashed up to the second floor. He found Amanda lying on a bed in a small room, her eyes closed and a waxen mask covering her face. She was surrounded by her mother, Eudoxia, an old, obese woman who was crying her heart out, and a few relatives. Najib, her brother, looking drawn and haggard, was chain-smoking. Tobacco, of course, was banned in Caracalla but they made a nice-tasting cigarette substitute from an assortment of powders.

Najib shouted at Pascal: “Pregnant! She was pregnant. She slit her womb open to get rid of the fetus.”

“Who got her pregnant?” Pascal asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Najib replied.

Yet his eyes betrayed a hateful accusation.

Thereupon an intern entered and uttered a stream of reassuring words: “Mademoiselle Normand has lost a lot of blood, it’s a fact. But she is young and robust. She had not slit open her womb as we had feared and that’s the main thing. She will soon be going home.” Even so, Pascal got the impression that this was just the beginning and a monstrous epilogue was brewing.

The next morning Amanda went home as the intern had predicted. The day after, she was dead.

The circumstances of her death were both striking and painful. When Eudoxia brought up Amanda’s morning turmeric herb tea, intended to set her back on her feet, she found the bed empty and the room deserted. Panic-stricken, she rushed downstairs and ran across the garden to alert her neighbor, when she stumbled upon the body of her daughter, lying among the potted plants. Her corpse was already stiff. She had succumbed to the ingestion of a well-known virulent poison called Marie-Cécile which grows on the upper slopes of the mountain. The police were unable to decide whether she had deliberately drunk this decoction or whether someone had forced her.

At Caracalla, like everywhere else, the poor are not treated seriously. Very quickly her death was classified as a cold case and after a few days the body was handed back to her family.

Barely thirty people gathered for the wake. A group of relatives, putting on sorrowful looks, comforted the mother, who hadn’t stopped crying now for days on end. Najib, too, seemed at the point of giving up the ghost.

The funeral took place early afternoon. One of the Mondongues’ principles is that we are all equal in death. The coffin was taken by identical hearses and state undertakers to the cemetery, named The Last Dwelling, where identical black-and-white square tombs overlooked the sea.

Previously Caracalla included a second cemetery located amid the dense mountain vegetation, this one known as The Star-Spangled Domain. In order to be buried there you had to have been a credit to

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