The old woman’s contralto voice murmurs as she presses something hard into my hand, and closes my fingers tightly around it. I look down to see a shelled nut resembling a smooth walnut. She nods conspiratorially, telling me to crush it and stir it into my coffee. “Vous allez voir!” she laughs as I depart the stalls of the open market under its multicolored tents held down from the tropical winds by sandbags in large, plastic buckets. Pointe-à-Pitre’s Marché des épices overwhelms me with its excess of home-culled aromatic essences, each jewel-toned bottle labelled by hand in French. The worn tent flaps confine the humid air, heavy with competing fragrances around me, and I struggle to inhale and to pick out phrases in the creole French chant of the stall-keepers. Even in the uproar, I linger as it is the only shelter from the sunlight that blisters the square’s pavement. I knew of Guadeloupe’s legendary heat, and of its history of spice-trade and slavery from my studies in French. Yet literature about the area seemed to involve only decadent villas, tasting orgies, or climbing expeditions to satisfy some insistent, communal one-upmanship. Few, it seemed, see Pointe-à-Pitre as more than a transitional segue to their real sojourn, as the town name connotes urban menace and astounding poverty. Cruise passengers cleave to a narrow swath of facades between the docks and the market, while hikers bypass the city for the more wild spaces of Basse Terre, in the south. I was craving a simple walk downtown to encounter daily life in the capital as my favorite novelist Maryse Condé would have done in her childhood. The old woman’s fleeting embrace in the market stall had further anchored my stubborn Luddism. Rounding the corner of a palm-covered sunny square, Place de la Victoire, I faced a bare red wooden platform shaped in a circle rising a foot above the stone expanse. It seemed incomplete, a pedestal with no monument. With the absence explained, I began to entangle what had drawn me perversely to this city – this platform once housed a guillotine for runaway slaves. With the guillotine now dismantled, the platform remains a silent memorial to the unmentionable. I pulled myself further along past street-murals of faces grimacing viscerally at me, until I reached Memorial ACTE, a museum just four years old which commemorates the enslavement history of Guadeloupe. It rises up in cool, steel modernism among the traditional creole homes in the hot, narrow streets. The tiny pastel-colored houses without electricity or water voice a quiet dignity against the gigantesque steel-girded museum which curves to somehow suggest the hull of a ship. Inside the exhibit, the groans of chained humanity fill the air, and the ship-like walls and floor heave. My stomach reels with culpability. Outside, down the path to the infamous harbor, I turn my eyes to the stone fort, La Fleur d’épée, poised on the crest of the cliff across the water. A haunting space with somber prison cells of thick mossy stone, it can be entered (or exited) only through a new space in a pair of impenetrable iron gates dating from the Napoleonic era. Flashes of colorful modern artwork uttering strangely meek epithets to care for the planet, are incongruously entombed in the murk. My shudder subsides; it is this damp opacity, rather than sparkling beaches, that I have been seeking. Later, I sink uneasily into my straw chair at the open-air restaurant Ti Maki, and every bite of vibrant food affirms my discomfort with the glib, French-Antillean hybrid. A mug of herbed, iced mango is as pungent as my own colonial guilt, as majesty and tragedy swirl together in my mind. I had expected a few happily curious days of digging into an island’s past, loving how small that state of fascination makes me feel. Instead, I’m riveted by the unspoken here. Wanting more time with the mute ghost of the guillotine, and with the mysterious insights distilled by the octogenarian market-woman from some opaque well of the past, I realize that it is not comfort that will soothe me after all; only discomfort can do that here.