Love, Anger, Madness - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 7

LOVE

Quietly, like a shadow, I watch this drama unfold scene by scene. I am the lucid one here, the dangerous one, and nobody suspects. An old maid! No husband. Doesn’t know love. Hasn’t even lived, really. They’re wrong. In any case, I’m savoring my revenge in silence. Silence is mine, vengeance is mine. I know into whose arms Annette will throw herself, and under no circumstances do I plan to open the eyes of our sister Félicia. She is too enraptured and carries the three-month-old fetus in her womb with too much pride. If she was smart enough to find herself a husband, I want her to be smart enough to keep him. She has too much confidence-in herself, in everyone. Her serenity exasperates me. She smiles while sewing shirts for the son she’s expecting, because of course it must be a son! And Annette will be the godmother, I bet…

I rest my elbows on the bedroom windowsill, and watch: standing in broad daylight, Annette offers Jean Luze the freshness of her twenty-two years. Their backs to Félicia, they claim each other without the slightest gesture. Desire bursting in their eyes. Jean Luze struggles, but there is no way out.

I am thirty-nine years old and still a virgin. The unenviable fate of most women in small Haitian towns. Is it like that everywhere? Are there towns in the world like this one, half mired in ancestral habits, people spying on each other? My town! My land! as they proudly call this dreary graveyard, where you see few men besides the doctor, the pharmacist, the priest, the district commandant, the mayor, the prefect, all of them newly appointed to their posts, all of them such typical “coast people” that it’s nauseating. Suitors are exotic birds, since parents here always dream of sending their sons away to Port-au-Prince or abroad to make learned men of them. One of them came back to us in the person of Dr. Audier, who studied in Paris and in whom I still search in vain for something superhuman…

I was born in 1900, a time when prejudice was at its height in this little region. Three groups emerged, isolated from each other like enemies: the “aristocrats” to whom we belonged, the petty bourgeois, and the common people. Tugged at by the delicate ambiguity of my situation, I suffered from an early age because of the dark color of my skin. The mahogany color I had inherited from some great-great-grandmother went off like a small bomb in the tight circle of whites and white-mulattoes with whom my parents socialized. But that is the past, and I don’t care to return to what is no more, at least not for now…

Father Paul says I have poisoned my mind with education. The truth is that my wits were asleep and I have stirred them-with this journal. I have discovered in myself unsuspected talents. I believe I can write. I believe I can think. I have become arrogant. I have become self-conscious. To reduce my inner life to what the eye can see, that’s my goal. A noble task! Will I succeed? To speak of myself is easy. All I have to do is lie a lot while convincing myself that I’m really putting my finger on it. I will attempt sincerity: solitude has made me bitter; I am like a fruit fallen before ripening, rotting under the tree unnoticed. Hurrah for Annette! After Justin Rollier, the poet who died of tuberculosis, there was Bob the Syrian; after Bob now Jean, brother-in-law to us both-and she is not yet twenty-three. Our little town of X is emancipating itself. It would seem we have been contaminated by what they call civilization.

I am the oldest of the three Clamont sisters. There are about eight years in age between each of us. We live together in this house, an undivided inheritance from our late parents. As usual, I have been entrusted with the more vexing tasks. You have nothing to do, so keep busy, they seem to say. And they have handed the keys to both house and strongbox over to me. I am at once servant and mistress of the house, a kind of housekeeper on whose shoulders rests the daily round of their lives. As recompense, each gives me something to live on. Annette works. A nice bourgeois girl ruined, cornered by circumstances, floundering shamelessly in compromise and promiscuity, and where else but as a salesgirl with Bob Charivi, a Syrian of the worst sort with a store on Grand-rue. Jean Luze, Félicia’s husband, a handsome Frenchman, beached on our welcoming shores by who knows what miracle, is in the employ of Mr. Long, an American executive who has been here for ten years. I need very little, and thanks to them I am gathering a fortune. I have developed a sordid miserliness in my old age. You should see me patiently counting my nest egg each month. “It’s dreadful,” Annette likes to say, “how Claire neglects herself!”

Félicia shrugs.

Since she got married, only Jean Luze exists. Gorgeous Jean Luze! Brilliant Jean Luze! The exotic and mysterious foreigner, who has set up his library and record collection in our house, and makes fun of our backward way of living and thinking. A flawless man, an ideal husband. Félicia’s cup overfloweth with love and admiration. I won’t be the one to open her eyes. From my window, I spy on their every move. This is how I came to find Annette in the arms of her Syrian boss one night. She was in the back of the car they had parked halfway in the garage. I saw everything, heard everything, despite all the precautions they were taking in order not to wake Félicia. They hadn’t thought of me. How could the old maid, uninterested in anything having to do with love, suspect them for one moment? That affair lasted until Félicia’s engagement. After that, everything fell apart for Annette again…

Félicia is of average height and on the voluptuous side, light-skinned with bland blond hair and the delicate features of a white woman. Although Annette is white too, there is gold under her skin. And her hair is black, blue-black like her eyes. Except for the skin color, she is a touched-up copy of me sixteen years ago. These two white-mulatto girls are my sisters. I am the surprise that mixed blood had in store for my parents, no doubt an unpleasant surprise in their day, given how they made me suffer… Times have changed, and I have learned with age to appreciate what has been given me. History is on the move and so is fashion, fortunately…

Jean Luze stares at Annette. He is struggling. And yet he knows very well that he will give in. When she has a man on the brain-and I have paid dearly for this bit of knowledge-she doesn’t give him up easily. And this one is among the most glamorous I have ever seen. The broad strides he takes in the yard! The way he climbs the stairs! His voice so young, so cheerful, and yet somewhat subdued and unaware of the cheer it spreads. His perfect speech! The way his gaze caresses everything so casually. Even me.

“Claire, how are you doing?”

He passes me by and goes up to his room, their room. But he doesn’t desire Félicia anymore, that much I know. Annette is the one on his mind. Besides, Félicia is ill served by her pregnancy. She is in no shape to defend herself. Her smile is more and more trusting, more and more mawkish, as Annette’s glances become more aggressive, more tormenting. How will this end? I keep vigil. I stand in the wings, I don’t exist for them. I push them onstage skillfully, without ever seeming to intervene, and yet I am directing. If only by the way I encourage Félicia to rest on the chaise longue on the balcony, all the while knowing that Annette and Jean Luze will be alone together downstairs in the dining room…

I close the doors, seemingly indifferent, and I wait. They stand there silent, devouring each other with their eyes, senses melting as they move in for the kill. This is not the right time yet. Annette cannot forget that Jean Luze is her brother-in-law, nor he that she is his wife’s sister.

For a while now we’ve been hanging our heads like snarling dogs, harassed as we are by fear, by the summer, the sun, by hunger and all that comes of it. The hurricanes are responsible, unleashed by God to punish us for what Father Paul calls our lack of faith and our weaknesses.

We stick out our tongues in this terrible sun in the throes of a Haitian summer. A thick, enormous, slavering tongue, licking at our skin, cutting off our breath. We are being cooked alive. Our sweat flows without pause. There is no moisture in the air, and the coffee, the only source of wealth around here, is drying up. Any day now, Eugénie Duclan, a friend of Father Paul the parish priest, will organize processions to persuade the clouds.

“Rain is a blessing from heaven,” Father Paul asserts in a very Haitian way during the course of his sermons.

So then we are cursed! Hurricanes, earthquakes and drought, nothing spares us. The beggars outnumber us. The survivors of the last hurricane, crippled and half-naked, haunt our gates. Everyone pretends not to see them. Hasn’t the poverty of others always been with us? After growing for the last ten years, it has the frozen face of habit. There have always been those who eat and those who fall asleep with an empty stomach. My father, a planter as well as a speculator, with over six hundred acres of land planted with coffee, accused the hungry of laziness.

“What is it that you do for a living?” he would say to those imploring him for a handout. And then he would answer his own question: “You beg.”

“Heartless!” Tonton Mathurin [1] would cry out, “heartless!” Ah, the brave Tonton Mathurin we had learned to fear as if he were the very devil! He’s been dead twenty years now, and all these twenty years I always think I see him standing there when I pass his front door, draped in his old houpland [2] and spitting at my father…

Misery, social injustice, all the injustices in the world, and they are countless, will disappear only with the human species. One remedies hundreds of miseries only to discover millions of others… It’s a lost cause. And of course there is the hunger of the body and that of the soul. And the hunger of the mind and the hunger of the senses. All sufferings are equal. To defend himself, man refines the meanness of his heart. By what miracle has this poor nation managed to stay so good, so welcoming, so joyful for so long, despite its poverty, despite injustice, prejudice, and our many civil wars? We have been practicing at cutting each other’s throats since Independence. The claws of our people have been growing and getting sharper. Hatred has hatched among us, and torturers have crawled out of the nest. They torture you before cutting your throat. It’s a colonial legacy to which we cling, just as we cling to French. We excel at the former but struggle with the latter. I often hear the prisoners’ screams. The prison is not far from my house. I see it from my window. The gray of its walls saddens the landscape. The police force has become vigilant. It monitors our every move. Its representative is Commandant Calédu, a ferocious black man who has been terrorizing us for about eight years now. He wields the right of life and death over us, and he abuses it.

Two days after his arrival, he searched almost every house in town. Anything that could pass for a weapon was confiscated, including Dr. Audier’s hunting rifle. Accompanied by policemen to secure the premises, he rifled through our closets and drawers, lips stiff with hatred. How many people has he murdered? How many have disappeared without a trace? How many have died under unspeakable conditions? And cruelty is contagious: kneeling on coarse salt, forcing a victim to count the blows tearing at his skin, his mouth stuffed with hot potatoes, these are a few of the minor punishments some of us inflict upon our child-servants. Upon those turned slaves by hunger, who must suffer our spite and rage in all its voluptuousness. My blood boils at the sound of their cries and those of the prisoners-rebellion grumbles in me. This goes back to the days when I hated my father for whipping the sons of our farmers for next to nothing.

Despite the ruins, despite the poverty, our little town remains beautiful. I realize this once in a while, in jolts of awareness. Habit destroys pleasure. I often walk past the sea and the mountains that frame the horizon in complete indifference. And yet, devastated as they are by erosion, the mountains are heartbreakingly beautiful. From a distance, the dried-up branches of the coffee bushes take on soothing pastel tones, and the shore is embroidered with foam. A smell of kelp seems to rise from the depths of the water. Small boats are tied to stakes on the shore. Their white sails stain the sea as the sky dives in and blends into the water. Once a week, we hear the American ship blow its horn. The only one moored in our port now, it leaves loaded with fish, coffee and precious wood. Our colonial-style house, part of its roof carried away by the wind in the last storm, is sixty years old. Each side leans on another house, Dora Soubiran’s on one side and Jane Bavière’s on the other-two childhood friends with whom we no longer associate for separate but equally valid reasons. Other houses, twins to ours, line the Grand-rue on both sides and are at odds with the modern villa of the new prefect, M. Trudor, a figure of authority whom everyone greets with a bow. We have lost our smugness and will greet anyone with a bow. Many a spine has been bent by all this scraping. M. Trudor hosts receptions to which all the former mulatto-bourgeois-aristocrats are invited. And the latter, taking thick skins out of their closets along with their silk dresses, respond promptly even as they grouse. One has to howl with the wolves, after all. And since the times have changed everything, we are making an effort to adapt. A few of us get our ears boxed, but Annette, bon vivant of the day that she is, takes care to represent us without overlooking a single invitation.

The rocky main street, just about demolished since the hurricanes, has been hollowed out by greenish ditches where mosquitoes nest. The mayor, a plump griffe [3] with a taste for women and liquor, has other fish to fry. The decaying street is not among his preoccupations. He whiles away his time at the corner grocer’s, Mme Potiron, a grimelle [4] who sells clairin [5] infused with herbal aphrodisiacs. Beggars shivering with fever squat beside the ditches and cup their hands in the stinking water to drink it. In the narrow streets, some dilapidated shacks, holding on as well as they can atop their nearly ruined foundations, shelter suspect-looking families with hollow cheeks. A few poets hunted by the cops-who don’t trust what they call “the intellectuals”-also live there. The police are worried for nothing, since we have become as gentle as lambs and more cautious than turtles. Our endless civil wars have ages ago become the stuff of epic legend, regarded with a smile by our youth.

In the midst of this squalor, the prefect lives in style in his villa. He does not earn much, but he is rich.

“The good Lord has punished you,” he sighs when beggars hold out their hands.

“The good Lord is unhappy with you,” Father Paul echoes from his pulpit. “You are giving in to superstition. You practice voodoo. God has punished you.”

In the thirty years he has lived in this country and fought this religion, he hasn’t yet understood that nothing will ever uproot it. In order not to believe in it, in order not to seek the protection of the gods, one has to free oneself once and for all of everything, one has to shake the yoke of any divinity and count only on one’s own strength. Which I have done. But how can you stop this ignorant people from clinging to something they see as a life raft, when even its representatives, when even my own father, the Parisian mulatto, served his loas [6] regularly.

My door is double-locked and I keep a key in my pocket. I do not let anyone in, not even my sisters. Still, just in case, I have hidden under my bed the romance novels I devour and the pornographic postcards sold to me one night on a deserted street corner by a suspicious young man with glasses, who was freshly arrived from Port-au-Prince and who fortunately vanished without a trace.

There is no such thing as purity, and the needs of the flesh are normal. Can anyone live without eating or drinking? I twist on my bed, prey to desires that nothing slakes. I close my bedroom window and make sure that my door is locked and take off my clothes. I am naked, in the mirror still beautiful. But my face is withered. I have bags under my eyes and wrinkles on my forehead. The graceless face of a love-starved old maid. I hate Félicia for having brought this man home. My temptation. My awful and delicious temptation! When they leave the bedroom, I go and touch, I smell the sheets on which they made love, starving for this smell of seaweed mixed with male sweat, which must be the smell of sperm and which blends with Félicia’s bland perfume.

Annette no longer has Bob Charivi drive her home. Rain or shine, she walks home. It is a tactic like any other, designed to move Jean Luze. I concur with this tactic. I want Annette to be Jean Luze’s. I want her to take Félicia’s place in that man’s life. I don’t like Félicia. She is too white, too blond, too lukewarm, too orderly. Ah! If only I had Annette’s youth. As I am, I would never dare. I only have to look at my face, prematurely aged, to withdraw immediately. A wasted face! I blame it on frustration, for which I reproach myself. Why did Jean Luze choose Félicia?

I remember his arrival in this country, one morning last year around this time. A rented car, covered in mud and dust, with a black driver behind the wheel, stopped in front of our house by chance. All the shutters lifted at once and the newcomers fell under the scrutiny of the curious eyes behind our yellowed and dusty lace curtains. I was sweeping the porch. He opened his door and walked up to me. Did he take me for the maid? He barely greeted me and asked where he could find the office of M. Long, the American, the director of the Export Corporation; I pointed it out to him. Later on when he returned for a visit with Dr. Audier, who explained that M. Luze had come here with the intention of collaborating with the Export Corporation, Annette made arrangements to seduce him. As for me, he hardly seemed to notice me. Only when Dr. Audier said, “May I introduce you to the Clamont girls?” did I see him fix his eyes upon me in astonishment. In that moment all the complexes, of which I had thought myself to be definitively cured, were roused in me. His amused gaze took in the living room, grazed Annette, and stopped on Félicia. She looked up at him with eyes full of fright and admiration, as she beheld him with parted lips. I think I loved him from the very first minute. Unfortunately, I was too practiced in the art of deception, and behind my mask of detachment, I burned in silence like a torch. Rigid, stuffy, suspicious like a cop, I would make the most resourceful prospects run away. Even long before, with Frantz Camuse and Justin Rollier, two acceptable suitors, I was unable to react. True, at that time I would shrink because I was self-conscious about my dark skin, which our acquaintances hypocritically pretended was a most unusual phenomenon.

“She is so different from her sisters!” “Who does she look like?” But under their breath, they added: “This one really fell off the oven rack.”

Furthermore, I imagined sexual relations, caresses, even kisses, to be shameful acts that only the Church could absolve through the sacrament of marriage. Raised on absurd primers that drilled it into me, throughout my entire youth, that love is a sin, cloistered in this house, in this town which I had only left twice to go to Port-au-Prince escorted by my parents, I lived surrounded by people for the most part no more enlightened than my tutors. Shamefaced, I learned to repress my instincts. Any intimacy with those who did not belong to the highest level of society meant dishonor for my parents. Their narrow-mindedness influenced me to such an extent that the only people who existed as far as I was concerned were those we received at home. My mother avoided greeting any woman suspected of adultery, while my father found all women depraved. He was a womanizer, so he knew what he was talking about. To please such parents, you had to live like a recluse so as to escape malicious gossip, which was as damning in their eyes as the fault itself.

I understood a bit late that the act of love is like any other physiological need of a human being. Just as late, I realized the stupidity of social classifications based on wealth and color. I became skilled at unmasking the social climbers, the hypocrites, guessing that behind their saintly little airs these artists spun the most elaborate embroideries of copulation. I have fun imagining such and such a couple going at it. And they appear to me either ridiculous or deliciously titillating, depending on whether their coupling seems grotesque or gracious.

The shade from the trees creates a refreshing oasis under my window. I see Jean Luze and Annette come in. He brought her home today. And Félicia welcomes them with open arms. She threw up five times today, she tells her husband as he kisses her absentmindedly The smell of the food on the table drives her away. I am the one who serves Jean Luze. He eats slowly, keeping his eyes on his plate. Annette laughs because he almost spilled his drink. Her laughter rings like a chime on crystal, and her eyes, slanted like butterfly wings, shine as brightly as her teeth. This is torture for Jean Luze. He excuses himself and gets up. She calls him back to ask for a cigarette. The way she pronounces his name! Like a song on her lips. She pauses on its one-syllable note and holds it. She looks into his eyes as she lifts her cigarette to his lighter.

“Thank you, Jean.”

“You’re welcome.”

The tone is polite but it reveals a bad mood thinly veiled.

“You seem upset.”

“Me?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing at all.”

She goes up to the living room, puts a record on the turntable and starts dancing by herself. The needle squeaks.

“I beg of you, don’t damage my equipment.”

He is watching her without paying any attention to me.

A crowd gathers in the street: speculators, traders, farmers, managers, wholesale dealers and retailers grab each other by the collar and seem ready to eat each other alive. The noise is deafening. They accuse each other. Each blames the other for his losses or his ruin. How careless. Have they forgotten about the commandant and his men ensconced at the Cercle? They will pick them up tonight with nary a word, simply accusing them of subversive activities. Jean Luze is standing near me by the dining room door, which opens onto the porch. We look on.

“What’s the matter with them?” he asks me.

“They’re fighting.”

“As usual. And the tragedy is that no one seems to understand the real problem.”

He has an ironic little laugh, almost silent.

In one booth, a scale once used to weigh coffee sways like a cripple. Piles of sacks lie empty on the ground, a few coffee beans scattered around. Some beggars run toward us with their hands out. Jean Luze winces in disgust.

“It’s awful!” he says.

And really, they do stink.

A cop pulls apart these growling dogs and beats the more stubborn ones. A beggar in rags with a face devoured by hunger looks at us furtively.

“They are getting their heads bashed on top of it,” Jean Luze mutters through clenched teeth.

He has already learned to be cautious.

The beggar raises his arm to scratch his head and reveals a gun, secured to his waist by a rope.

It’s one of Commandant Calédu’s spies. The police chief is known to be a sadist. He loves to whip women, and once in a while he has them arrested just like that, one or two at a time for his pleasure.

With my own eyes I have seen Dora Soubiran, my childhood friend and our neighbor, walk out of jail after being accused of sedition. She is a completely harmless zealot who insists-perversely or not-that God is her only supreme leader. Calédu loves to be feared and to be shown that he is feared. Especially when the one in question is Dora Soubiran, scion of the late César Soubiran, former director of the lycée, schooled in Paris, former parliamentarian, who served as an ambassador in previous administrations. Dora Soubiran looks down her nose at him. She refuses to understand the march of history, its twists and reversals. So one evening, he came to get her himself. She followed him down the street, saying her rosary as people lay low in the dark behind their half-opened shutters. She came back two days later, haggard and unrecognizable, followed by the taunts of the beggars roaring with laughter to see her walk with open legs like a cripple. We hear her sob at night. No one dares rescue her. She’s a suspect. One of those who has been marked by Calédu, a man chosen expressly by the police to tame this little town famous for its arrogance and prejudices.

***

In three days it will be my birthday and they want to throw me a party. I don’t care for it. I have no interest in being on display. I’ll still make a cake, so no one will say that I’m a cheapskate… “A chocolate cake,” Annette adds with a comically avid expression, “just like you know how to make.” Yes, but where will I find the chocolate? Well, she’s going to have to make do with what’s on the table. She is brimming with life. She must be temptation itself for Jean Luze. He eyes her greedily, unwittingly. With every subtle movement, her long legs trace riveting arabesques. His courage and will are wearing thin. Félicia has not left her room in two days. They must feel as if they’re alone, more uninhibited. Is Annette really going to overcome Jean Luze’s resistance? He often gives her these long looks that make me tremble. Maybe I’m getting more out of all that he gives her. I’m getting more than she is. What a miracle!

“Monsieur Long gave me two bottles of whiskey,” Jean Luze announces. “I’ll invite him to the party.”

“Fine,” nods Félicia.

“What about the commandant?” Annette asks.

“No,” I protest forcefully.

“Oh! You know,” she says coldly, “we are no longer living in the days of our dear parents. Prejudice is out of fashion.”

“This has nothing to do with prejudice,” I reply.

“We should still have him over once in a while,” prudent Félicia adds cautiously. “What good would it do to turn him against us?”

“Everyone receives him,” Annette insists, “even Madame Camuse. If he sours on us, what then?”

“Do you have something against him, Claire?” asks Félicia. “Of course what happened to Dora is most appalling. But she has always been heedless…”

“He’s not a bad guy, you know,” says Annette. “He has his orders. He can’t ignore them. In any case, he’s a handsome soldier. He’s a wonderful dancer and always brings gifts for the ladies. Just the other day, he brought back a magnificent necklace to Corrine Laplanche from Port-au-Prince.”

“Well, it’s normal for someone like Corrine Laplanche to accept his presents, but not you,” Félicia retorted.

“Why?”

“Because your name is Annette Clamont.”

“That’s rubbish,” Annette cried. “Corrine Laplanche is better educated than all the Clamont sisters put together. The only difference is that her parents don’t belong to good society, as you so often like to say, that’s all. And anyway, her mother, Élina Jean-François, was a classmate of Claire’s… Isn’t that right, Claire?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“I won’t bother asking why you didn’t befriend her,” she added. “Well, me, I choose the people I like wherever I happen to meet them, without giving any thought to their table manners. The only thing I ask of them is that they have qualities that I don’t have and can’t help but admire.”

My sentiments precisely. Did I put those words in her mouth?

“That’s very good, Annette,” Jean Luze offers approvingly, looking at her with interest. “You are not as harebrained as you like to seem. You should read more, for your own good…”

“I am only twenty-two! I have plenty of time. I don’t mind fumbling around before finding myself.”

“Believe me, you can fumble around just as well while educating yourself,” Jean Luze answered. “But it’s Claire’s birthday and not yours. Let her choose her guests herself.”

“So there won’t be anyone,” Annette concluded with despair.

“There will be us,” I replied calmly.

“And Monsieur Long,” said Annette.

“And Monsieur Long.”

Jean Luze caught up with me by the bedroom door.

“You hate him, don’t you?”

“Who?”

“The commandant.”

“I don’t like people I don’t know.”

“What about me, you must like me since you know me, right? Do you like me, Claire?”

“Of course I do. Aren’t you my brother-in-law?”

“That’s not a good enough reason.”

He laughed, leaning a hand on the wall.

“A piece of advice: don’t make a show of your antipathy for Calédu,” he said to me. “You could pay dearly for it. I am new here but I have already understood a few things. In the middle of the twentieth century your little town is going through what France went through during the time of Louis XVI. It would be amusing if it were not tragic. Play along and keep your head down with the commandant and his people. Don’t make a show of your antipathy as Dora Soubiran did. That kind of attitude is pointless and can’t end well…”

I left him abruptly and went in my room. Who does he take me for? I, who tremble with fright at the slightest noise, I, who avoid suspects to the point that I won’t see Dora, I, who won’t exchange words or looks with these armed men, and here he thinks me capable of braving that hangman Calédu. The fool! I am a coward and I know it. My cozy bourgeois upbringing is like a tattoo on my skin. Is he that blind? How dare he confuse a lover’s loathing, a lover’s outrage, for something else, that’s what I can’t forgive!

I saw Dora passing by. She hobbles along with legs spread apart like a maimed animal. What have they done to her? What awful torments has she endured that for a month now she has been unable to walk normally? Dr. Audier looks after her but he keeps his mouth shut. I saw him leave her house recently, head down, a frown on his brow.

“And our neighbor?” Jean Luze asked him.

He stared at him without answering, lips contorted.

He is brave enough for looking after a victim, Dr. Audier must tell himself. The reign of terror has broken his spirit. The politician, the great champion of freedom and the rights of man that he was when my father was alive, is dead in him. He even smiles when he shakes Calédu’s hand. He is old and experienced. He smiles at the prefect. He smiles at the mayor. Despite his hatred for our former occupiers, he smiles at M. Long. M. Long, who buys anything that grows at low prices and who lives around here, has cleverly found shelter under the wings of the authorities in order to better suck our blood. And these black imbeciles seem flattered by the white man’s self-serving friendship. His house is protected with a wire fence, his water filtered, his food disinfected. He’s not taking any chances with microbes and mosquitoes. Malaria and typhoid will not get the better of him. Since the authorities only have one thing on their minds-to get rich by any means necessary, to humiliate those who once humiliated them and crush the arrogant bourgeois-M. Long exploits this desire, nodding and applauding: Marvelous! Go ahead! God save Haiti!

Today is Sunday. I put on my long-sleeved dress and my black hat and went to mass. I followed the ceremony without participating, eyes on my prayer book and rosary in hand. My mind was elsewhere. Where are they? What are they doing? I was saying to myself. Jean Luze and Annette were still in bed when I left. I imagined them eating together. I could hear Annette’s laughter. I imagined Jean Luze’s eyes on her. On my knees, as the priest raised the wafer, I tried in vain to chase such thoughts away. It did not escape me that for some time now I’d been faking piety. I had lost my faith when I saw the children’s bodies piled high before my eyes after the last hurricane. Many of the oldest and meanest had been spared. Why? was the first unanswered question that gave me the courage to make my point. How many of these women kneeling to receive the body and blood of our Lord had never helped their fellow man? I asked myself that Sunday. All those around me were great sinners-usurers, exploiters, sadists, corrupters of virtue. I had known them from tender childhood. Not a soul you could praise to the skies. Not one who spared either Jane Bavière, or Agnès Grandupré, who died of consumption thanks to them, not one among them who failed to condemn the only just man among us, an old man named Tonton Mathurin, before whom my father learned to tremble.

They look so angelic in church! What were they thinking as they grimaced through their prayers? Were they trying to cheat God Himself, our overly tolerant God who calls all lost sheep to His bosom?

***

It was probably about seven in the evening.

I was on the landing and about to go downstairs when I looked up and caught Annette and Jean Luze exchanging glances. Annette took his hand first and pushed him into her bedroom. I pretended to go downstairs only to double back and put my ear to the door and my eye to the keyhole: they were still dressed and Jean Luze, his hands on her shoulders, stone-faced, unrecognizable, appeared to be fighting temptation. He threw her on the bed. Her skirt was tucked up, and he looked at her with a kind of hateful and appreciative curiosity. She moaned and brutally pulled him against her, eyes closed, nails biting into his back.

I suddenly stood up, overcome by some sort of prudishness, but I stayed a moment behind the door, heart racing, cheeks flushed. Then, agitated and dizzy from waves of feelings crashing together in me, I ran and threw myself flat on my stomach in bed. I left this position only when I heard Félicia calling me. I washed my face in a frenzy and went to her. She wanted some soup and she asked where her husband was.

“He is in the living room,” I answered calmly.

“And what is he doing?”

“He’s reading.”

“Ask him to come give me a kiss. He’s always afraid to wake me.”

To gain time, I suggested that she freshen up a little.

When I left her room a few minutes later, I found Jean Luze in the living room where he was indeed reading. No doubt he was trying to seem calm, quite prudently. He stood up and chose a record, the same one as always. But in his distracted state he made a mistake and the second movement of Beethoven’s Concerto no. 5 rose in a flutter, discreet, melodious, before rushing headlong into an incredibly violent chord.

He gave me an infinitely sweet look.

“You like this concerto too, don’t you? You come in each time I play it. The first movement is just as beautiful but I made a mistake… Ah! I couldn’t live without music… I think I’ve brought a record player with me my whole life. I was hardly twenty when I gave up everything else and bought one for the first time. My parents had just died and I was trying to scrape together a living…”

Just then, Annette appeared. I searched her face, looking for traces of victory that I could enjoy. She lit up a cigarette with quivering hands and threw Jean Luze a sidelong glance devoid of the misty-eyed gratitude I thought I would find there. He stared at her like an enemy. Their attitude surprised and disappointed me. I was willing to live this love through Annette only if she could measure up to it. It was essential that she outdo herself. Had she profaned this act that was so important in my eyes? What did she say, how did she react? What happened between them? Could it be that their embrace came to nothing? That would be too devastating.

M. Long is a fat, puffy, congested man. It’s my birthday today, and we are literally being cooked alive, and M. Long looks like a boiled lobster. Jean Luze seats his boss and offers him some whiskey.

The cake is on the table, crowned with eighteen candles. Annette’s idea, naturally. They kiss me and offer me their gifts and all sing “Happy Birthday to You.” I got a sewing kit from Jean Luze, a box of handkerchiefs from Annette and from Félicia a gold medallion.

“I decorate you,” she said, pinning the medal to my blouse.

“Come now, give us a smile.”

Jean Luze held my chin and looked into my eyes. I’m afraid he’ll hear the disordered beating of my heart. He is tall and I barely reach his shoulder. I would like him to lean and take me in his arms to carry me very far away. Such is the incurable romantic that slumbers in all old maids!

We offer some cake to Augustine, the maid. The house is festive.

“Put on a record, Jean,” Annette proposes. “The screaming just ruins everything.”

The screams waft from the jail. Horrible, unsexed droning.

“Calédu is having a bit of fun,” M. Long exclaims with a jowl-shaking chortle. (His accent adds a childish note to his cruel remark.)

“A peculiar way to have fun, don’t you think?” Jean Luze asks him with a strange, almost hostile, smile.

“Oh, you know, I say to each his own. And anyway, you would have to be insane to try to change anything around here.”

He holds out his glass to Jean Luze, who fills it with another shot of whiskey.

Annette flutters around them. She pours on the charm even for this hideous American. She’s turning into a nymphomaniac.

“As I told you recently, Monsieur Luze,” M. Long continues, “the coffee harvest has been so bad that for the last three years we have had to fall back on timber. I’m waiting for an answer from the company. If we don’t export wood, we’ll have no choice but to close up shop. The timber stock in the mountains and even in the towns is just extraordinary! This island is amazing: the sea, the mountains, the trees! Yes it’s a pity, a real pity they are so poor and unlucky.”

“What will happen to the peasants and their small plots if they agree to deforestation? The rain will wash away the soil,” notes Jean Luze.

“Oh well, that, my dear friend, is their business. They can either agree to sell their wood or we can leave. We are not asking for a gift, not at all…”

I can’t fully follow the conversation. The screams make it hard to pay attention. I prick up my ears. I feel obliged to listen for the faintest whimper. I am almost certain that it is a child crying. I am developing a trained ear. A final outburst ends on a hoarse note, so painful that I stand up with my hands over my ears.

“The cries upset you that much?” M. Long asks me.

“Not at all.”

Jean Luze hands me a glass.

“Drink,” he says.

The glass shakes in my hand.

M. Long speaks of his country, so rich, so beautiful, so well organized, it seems. What has he come looking for in this hole, if not wealth? What if not to fleece the sheep that we are?

After M. Long’s departure, Félicia goes to her room. Jean Luze lingers in the living room listening to Beethoven. Standing in the dark, Annette is watching him. I stay up with them for as long as possible. I’m on to them: they have a rendezvous tonight. I close the doors and wait. The house seems asleep. I hear the careful patter of their steps, the creaking of the door to Annette’s room as it opens. I imagine them naked, kissing, taking each other again and again. I get in bed, naked as well, ablaze with desire. I am with them, between them. No, I am alone with Jean Luze. Amazing how love cancels out all other feelings. I would hear screaming from the jail and pay it no heed. I am Annette. I’m sixteen years younger. I hear nothing, and then a terrible cry and the sound of a body falling. It would be inconvenient to witness any kind of drama. I stay still, waiting for things settle. Annette’s door is ajar and Félicia is lying on the floor. Jean Luze, appropriately dressed, is leaning over his wife, while Annette, in a dressing gown, pale as a corpse, looks at me. I know nothing. I understand nothing. Isn’t fainting normal for pregnant women?

“Go get Dr. Audier,” I say to Jean Luze.

He quickly carries her into their room and runs off.

I hear his steps creaking on the stairs and it’s now my turn to lean over Félicia.

“My God, what’s happened to her?” Annette exclaims, hands on her heart.

She can’t play innocent. Acting is not her strong suit. She didn’t want these complications. She’s nervous, and she’s nervous that she’s nervous.

I avoid answering. I am busy rubbing Félicia’s hands.

“Leave the room, Annette.” That’s all I say.

Félicia and I are alone. I rub some alcohol on her cheeks, slap her and call her name. She comes to and starts sobbing.

“Claire! Claire!”

Oh no, I don’t want to hear anything. I’ll take care of her as always, but I don’t want to hear her secrets. Spare this poor old maid!

“Claire! Claire!”

“Keep quiet. You will just make things worse and you will lose the child.”

Jean Luze returns with Dr. Audier. She hides her face in her hands and bursts into fresh sobs. After examining her, Audier gives her a shot and prescribes a few days’ bed rest.

“You better not leave her side,” he advises Jean Luze in a low voice. “She’s had a terrible shock.”

He is full of repentance. He kisses her and whispers something in her ear.

I am still there, watching every move.

“Nothing happened, I swear, nothing,” he repeats, now in a louder voice.

Does she believe him? She touches his face slowly, full of tenderness, as if she has already forgotten everything. What confidence she has in him!

“There’s no hemorrhaging, that’s good!” the doctor declares. “Just simple fainting!”

I see him out and then return to Félicia’s side. The injection has put her to sleep.

I turn to Jean Luze with the most sincere expression I can muster and ask:

“How did this happen?”

He looks at me casually.

“I have no idea. I was in the living room and I heard her scream…”

Oh, what good liars we are, both of us!

He did not go to work this morning. The door to their room is closed and Augustine has brought them breakfast in bed. Annette seems more nervous than last night. She paces up and down, eyes on their door. Why has he shut himself up with Félicia? What is he going to promise? The door opens in the afternoon and Jean Luze emerges, somber and so distant that it would take superhuman courage to approach him. Annette nevertheless calls out to him, and he looks at her with intentionally unconcealed antipathy. I hide in order to hear their conversation.

“It’s over, Annette,” he says, “I hope you’ve understood this. Félicia’s life and the baby’s life depend on your behavior. You have to control yourself.”

“But I can’t, I just can’t…”

“Let’s not overdo it, shall we.”

His tone is cutting.

“I love you.”

“Quiet.”

“Living like this with you but not with you, and to keep quiet? That’s too much.”

“In that case, Félicia and I will leave. I got married to have a home, children, to be done with being a man-about-town. I don’t want problems, understand? I don’t want trouble.”

His voice is so hard that I doubt ever having seen them in each other’s arms.

“So, you didn’t love me?”

Silence.

“So, you didn’t love me?”

He answers with total astonishment and profound contempt.

“Love you? Come on.”

There is another silence, during which I regret not being able to see the expression on Annette’s face. Mine is stubborn and unhappy. Is it because I think I could plead our case much better?

“No need to leave the house.” Her voice trembles.

“All right then?” Jean Luze asks.

“All right,” she answers.

They each return to their own quarters. I run to lock myself in my room. His words were a slap in her face, and I feel their heat on my cheeks. All right, she said. It’s not all right. I plan to fight this. I will not accept seeing this affair end so pathetically. If Annette resigns herself and turns the page like a good sport, well, I refuse. Her courage, the courage I never had, must be rewarded and she must live out this love to my full satisfaction, until she’s sated…

Feel free to shriek at the top of your lungs if you ever see this manuscript; call me indecent, immoral. Sprinkle me with stinging epithets if it makes you happy, but you will not intimidate me anymore. I have wasted my time taking you seriously and ruined my life. I want revenge. I am swimming against the tide. I’m letting go, filling myself with rage. My life is not enough anymore. Eating, running the house, getting drunk on sleep, that’s not a life. I want something else. Just like you, just like everyone else. Our serene little faces, that’s just for the sake of appearances; our satisfied little smiles are for others to envy. It comforts, makes life easier when others think we are the blessed of this earth. No need for me to pry into your private life. I know what’s there. All private lives are alike. Why would you be different from me? Suffocating fear makes freaks of all of us. That’s why we take shelter behind a façade. When the façade crumbles, we are handed over to merciless judges worse than we are. Their status protects them. I fear them. They have taught me hypocrisy. In my awful loneliness, I have discovered that society isn’t worth shit. Society hides behind a barricade of idiocy. Society is a killer of liberty. Unless we shake off our yoke, we will come into this world, suffer, grow old, and die, always resigned to our fate. Life is not generous to many. What has she given me? Nothing. I failed to assert myself, and she forgot all about me. Every old maid, it seems, must have a cat or dog beside her. Eugénie Duclan has her cat and Dora Soubiran her dog. I don’t like animals. Their touch repels me. The faithful dog licking your feet and the sweetest cat watching you so it can leap on the table disgust me. They remind me of my inferiors. For fear of scandal, I have repressed an ocean of love within me. I have wasted my charms on self-absorbed solitude. My mating season has expired. I am a desert without refuge. It’s too late for me to start living. And yet everything lives around me as if to sharpen my regret, even the insects. I have more respect for them than for those who confine themselves to chastity and who flatter themselves that they have preserved their dignity. As if dignity were lodged somewhere in the body! The couples on my pornographic postcards offer me instruction on lovemaking: they attend to basic needs. The repressed have this in common: they exaggerate the importance of what they deny themselves. The priests conceal their desire under a skirt, the nuns under a veil, and yet they are both obsessed by it. “Our first duty is to avoid scandal,” my father, who lived a scandalous life, would say. He made a martyr of me, all for the sake of teaching me wisdom. Wisdom! I believed in this for a long time before discovering how empty it was. It’s debilitating. Happiness is fleeting. You need a touch of madness to catch it in its flight.

Annette did not come down for meals today. Neither did the Luzes. Since Félicia’s “indisposition,” Jean Luze comes home from work to lock himself up with her and I am alone in the dining room, putting together meals that I have Augustine send up. The house is quieter than a cemetery. As soon as Annette slips out, Jean Luze makes for the living room to listen to his music. I know his concerto by heart from hearing it so much. I love it as much as he does. It transports me so far away that when I return to myself, my nerves feel so naked that I find my daily life unbearable. Félicia, on the contrary, likes nothing that he likes. Music leaves her cold, books too. I secretly raid Jean Luze’s library. I have discovered real treasures on my own. Not even his science books put me off.

There is a crowd again on the main road. M. Long, with the prefect and the commandant at his side, tries to convince the peasants that the trees should be chopped down to sell the wood.

“Selling this wood will make you rich faster than coffee did,” M. Long says in the Creole of a petit-blanc. [7]

“If you buy it at the price of coffee, we’ll still be poor, Mister Long,” one peasant replies.

From the doors of their stores, the Syrians follow the scene, exchanging opinions in a language known only to them.

“This money will run through our fingers,” declares another peasant. “Let’s leave our trees standing, that’s all we have left. The vultures have come down on us, caw, caw, caw, and they want to pick the skin off our bones.”

A great burst of laughter shakes the crowd.

Calédu is getting riled up. The beggars roll voluptuously in the dust.

“Caw, caw, caw,” they repeat, doubling up with laughter.

Where do they find the strength to laugh?

“Think about it,” says the prefect. “Monsieur Long is bringing you business and if you don’t want it, you turn it down. No use getting worked up about it.”

“Break it up, break it up, go home and think it over,” the commandant orders.

He walks away, looking self-important, twirling his stick. Weapons hang from his belt. He’s a living arsenal. One hardly dares look his way. The beggars crawl backward, the peasants return home with heads low. Defeated in advance.

Now Calédu and M. Long stand in front of our gate. I hear them talk.

“Knock them over the head,” says M. Long. “You want our deal to fall through?”

“They’ll give in,” Calédu answers. “Hunger will make them see reason.”

The sun opens its hellmouth upon us. The sea brews its heavy, foaming waves.

I see Jean Luze come in. He has opened the collar of his shirt and walks past sponging his face. Sweat makes his brown hair stick to his forehead. Never has he been more handsome. “How are you?” he asks, and sits across from me in an armchair in the living room.

“It’s so hot!” he sighs. “It’s hilarious because, back in my country, I pictured this island differently. What came across in the books I read was some kind of paradise where no one could suffer or die.”

“You are disappointed.”

“It was always my dream to go off to a distant place. Besides, nothing was holding me back home. I came all the way here seeking riches and paradise. I eke out a living in the heart of hell. And yet, who can say this sky, this sea, is not beautiful, so full of the serene charm of this corner of the world. Something must have come and transformed this town into a hellish paradise.”

“Do you believe in curses?”

“No, I don’t believe in them. But it’s unsettling sometimes to feel the weight of an invisible evil hand. What was your life like before?”

“Me, well, you know…”

“Quit hiding behind one mask or another. Say what you think, Claire, learn to fight back. You are clearheaded, intelligent. You can’t call what’s happening here a punishment from God. You’ve already given this some thought and you’ve understood the problem. Admit it.”

“There’s nothing to understand. Times have changed, that’s all.”

“What was it like here before?”

“Different.”

I lower my head, dour as a buzzard.

“You’re a cagey one.”

The truth is painful to admit when it is humiliating. I would admit it to others, but not to him. It’s enough that he has witnessed our disgrace, our degradation. He leans over me, the dimple on his chin spreading as he smiles. The hair at his temples is turning gray. It’s adorable. I slowly lift my hand toward his hair. He is no longer looking at me. He’s indifferent. Without a word he walks to Félicia’s room, where she is waiting for him.

Annette’s Syrian boss gives her a ride home, yet again. She’s holding his hand and laughing too loudly. It’s false laughter, crazy laughter. She’s been losing weight before our very eyes. She and I are both living in a trance for fear that he will keep to his resolution. We live with the same scorn, the same worries, the same pain. Sometimes, I forget who I am and believe that I am the one Jean Luze is avoiding, the one he once held in his arms. I bridle at the thought that Annette will not fight to keep him. How could she have given up so easily? What is she afraid of? A man such as this should have inspired in her a taste for battle. I refine my ruse. I keep Félicia company in order to leave him free. I will waste my day in their insipid private life. I warmly receive that old crow Gisèle Audier, certain that her chatter will force Jean Luze to flee the room. She rolls along on her stubby legs and leans her absurdly withered snub nose over Félicia.

“My dear! Unbelievable, this fainting fit of yours!”

Félicia smiles. Soon, she will be able to lie on the chaise longue and return to working on the layette of her future son.

“And where is the lovely Annette…”

“She’s in her room,” Félicia answers.

Her voice wavers imperceptibly, but she controls herself. Gisèle Audier moves on to the subject of the tree felling that started yesterday.

“They have sold an extraordinary quantity of precious wood. I have heard that Monsieur Long will pay them a good price.”

“Jean thinks it’s bad for the coffee business.”

“And Jules is furious. But the truth is that he could never stand the Americans. He claims they are responsible for everything. I guess it all goes back to his hatred for the Occupation. The Occupation killed your father, and it made a paranoid maniac of my husband, who now sees the hand of the State Department everywhere, even in our worst political events. It’s really becoming an obsession.”

She laughs.

For a moment her words resurrect the ghosts of my father and his partisans. I can see Laurent, Justin Rollier and all the dead enter the Cercle l’Étoile, founded by the late M. Camuse, where, in a very different time, one after the other, the three sisters had made their debut in long silk gowns. The Cercle was ransacked by beggars on Calédu’s watch, and by now they’ve taken over the place. On that day, Mme Camuse nearly dropped dead of indignation…

Jean Luze plays a record in the living room. The notes penetrate me as he listens to them. My senses begin to vibrate so much that I rush to lock myself in my room. The sound explodes like a scream and then lingers in a caress. The entire house is suffused with it. What a hymn to life, this work born from suffering!…

In order to keep up appearances, I continue to attend mass regularly and receive communion every month. Father Paul hears my confession.

In order not to destroy the myth of the unblemished old maid, I admit to venial sins only. I keep the so-called mortal sins to myself. That’s between me and God. I will accept punishment bravely, no matter how terrible. I will appear before Him, pointing a finger at Him. I will be the one to accuse. I don’t care, everything may be perfect up there, but on earth, what a mess! I will tell Him what’s going on down here. I will open His eyes. In the meantime, as I have for the past twenty-five years, I will be one of the twelve Daughters of Mary at the procession for the Feast of the Virgin. Dressed like her, in a white dress and blue belt, I will escort our Immaculate Lady and carry her banner. With Father Paul’s help, Eugénie Duclan will launch her crusade to the Lord. This is the beginning of a series of processions, supplemented with songs and prayers, meant to move the heavens to pity and call on us its holy blessing. Father Paul has written a hymn: “May God make the rain descend upon us, may He wash this town of its sins. Mercy! Mercy!…”

Mme Camuse would never dare adorn her devotional display without my help. It’s a question of habit. She greets me with exclamations of joy:

“I knew you would never let me down. You’re so loyal. This time I would like a display representing a place in paradise where we’d have a saint wreathed in flowers. But who will be the saint?”

She simpers like a coquettish old cat and in a convincing voice declares:

“It will be you.”

“Me!”

“Yes, you’d make a great saint.”

“A much younger girl would be better,” I suggested, frightened to see her so attached to this idea.

“A younger girl, sure. But which one?”

“The prefect’s daughter.”

“The prefect’s daughter!” she exclaimed. “Oh no! What are you saying? That awful little negress! Look, and this is just between us, I can lower myself to make certain concessions, but not that far. People who come from nothing. Upstarts made rich by trickery! They are without manners, they looked the other way when the Cercle was pillaged, our Cercle founded by my poor husband, that once opened its doors only to the cream of society! They have turned it into their barracks and as we speak their filthy muddy feet soil our carpets and their armed rear ends are wedged in our armchairs!… Oh! I never thought you’d suggest such a thing, Claire.”

She’s literally suffocating.

“And yet you receive the commandant in your home,” I said to her.

She cast a worried glance at the door and lowered her voice:

“I never invited him,” she confided, “he came on his own. They are shockingly shameless.”

She is wearing a long-sleeved gray dress that falls to her boots. She takes a few small steps, clutches the cameo dangling on her chest at the end of a long chain, raises her head toward the French ancestor who stares back at her sternly and, changing the subject, says:

“I’d rather not do the display at all!”

She tidies her bun of white hair, pinning it atop her pretty and distinguished face, and changes the subject:

“I have heard from Frantz,” she informs me. “There’s a chance he will come visit me soon. I am sorry he didn’t marry you, believe me, because I’m somewhat afraid of this foreigner. Even though I have traveled, it’s surprising how provincial I am still. I’m at home only in my element… He seemed to find you charming, and that you were, my girl, that you were.”

She talks about me as if I were dead.

“Do you know my son is becoming a leading expert in the medical profession? And with his marriage to Mademoiselle Dechantre, he won’t have any trouble establishing himself in France.”

She struts, straightens her shawl and hands me a photo:

“Look how pretty she is,” she tells me.

She is indeed pretty, and much younger than I.

“So how are things at home with Félicia’s husband?” She adds, “I find him a bit… distant… a bit… strange…”

“Jean Luze is a perfect husband,” I answer dryly.

“Take it easy! So quick to get your knickers in a knot when it comes to him! In any case, he will give Félicia beautiful children… I think of your parents… This match would have made them so happy. I hope Annette will also make a match worthy of the name she carries.”

And passing as usual from one thought to another:

“Any news from poor Dora Soubiran?” she asks point-blank. “Seems like they maimed her. Have you seen her? I’m still waiting for things to settle down. Eugénie Duclan has seen her. In secret, but she did see her. She has nothing left down there… It must have been awful. She told Eugénie she saw her own flesh fly as Calédu whipped her, lying on her back, legs spread open, held down by four prisoners, four filthy beggars to whom he then offered her… I’m seventy-five years old. I have seen revolutionaries walk into this town, bandits; I’ve witnessed bloody battles, lived through civil war, but never, you hear me, never have I felt as evil and foul a curse hovering over this town as I feel it today…”

From the house next door, a plaintive voice swells, then cries out with effort. I prick up my ears to listen.

“It’s Jacques Marti,” she tells me, abruptly interrupting herself. “He’s been quite delirious since yesterday.”

“Hot, so hot, I’m burning up,” the voice intones. “God has opened the gates of hell upon us. Flames pour from the sky and Satan is among us. Beware! oh my brothers…”

“Shh… Be quiet,” whispers another voice. “People will hear you.”

The madman cries out.

“I see Satan, I see him, there he is, right there in front of me, spitting fire. So hot! I’m burning!”

“Bah!” Mme Camuse sighs, adjusting the shawl around her thin shoulders, “he’s hot, I’m cold. It’s a matter of age and temperament. Poor Joël! He’s been trying to calm him since yesterday but it’s no use. It’s hard to have to take care of a madman at his age.”

She stares at the door, suddenly afraid:

“I hope Jacques’ words won’t be misconstrued,” she whispers to me.

She shivers and wraps her arms around her chest.

A dull, rhythmic thumping resounds from above.

“They’re cutting down the trees,” says Mme Camuse again. “Listen to the sound of the axes.”

“Bam, bam, bam!” screams the madman. “Satan is knocking at the town gate. Bam, bam, bam!…”

“Shh…” Joël says to his brother.

I leave Mme Camuse. In the street, I run into Calédu. He greets me but I pass without turning my head, haughty, contemptuous, pretending not to see him. Nothing escapes me, though: not the beggars clinging to him, nor their pleas, nor the kicks he gives them to make them let go, nor their reproachful faces, the hatred in the eyes of one decrepit old man shivering feverishly by the gutter.

I feel like getting a new dress. I feel like being beautiful for the Feast of the Virgin. Such things can happen to women my age, too, even to old maids. I will have Jane Bavière, our neighbor on the left, make it. It’s time I helped her-number one, out of bravado, and, number two, to annoy Félicia. I can imagine the exchange:

“You, Claire, are condoning vice,” she will tell me in a shrill and exasperating tone. “Just why did you pick her of all people? An unwed mother!”

You would think maturity has no part in our mental evolution. Jane Bavière was once a friend, and I have decided to reestablish our old ties. I have abandoned her long enough. I believe I have offered sufficient applause for our proper bourgeois nonsense. I am rising up against it now. There is nothing else to do. Is it because I think that she, too, has had her share of bad luck? No matter, when I am with her, I can relax. I am not yet able to confide in her, but what she has confided about herself, with a spontaneity I envy, is a most meaningful lesson about life. She is as serene as Félicia, just as happy. And I had thought that anxiety, suspicion, and bitterness were the wages of scandal.

“Criminal!” Eugénie Duclan once yelled at her. “You have murdered your mother and father.”

Her son is grown up and already ten.

“And Jane?” Mme Camuse asks again without pity. “Still living in sin, is she?”

I wish I had Jane Bavière’s courage. A kid would bring some purpose to my life. A kid would offer solace for everything. At least, that’s what I think. After all, if I reached this goal, wouldn’t I be disappointed? Is that really what I most aspire to? Aren’t I fooling myself by gnawing on my own unhappiness, on this idea that I’m a failure? I’m too afraid of scandal to try it. I’m afraid of others and this fear is the guarantee of my so-called honesty. I prefer to indulge in artificial joys. I nurse a doll in secret. I play mommy, at my age. I try to fill my existence with this effigy that smells of glue. I convince myself that I love her and sprinkle her with cologne and powder to better fool myself. I bought her a little bottle. Ah! The ploys I invented to avoid Annette’s suspicions! She sold me the doll herself, at the Syrian’s, and the toy bottle too.

“Who is it for?” she asked me.

“For a goddaughter in Port-au-Prince. You don’t know her.”

“Who will deliver it?”

“Someone.”

I’m no chatterbox. She contents herself with my monosyllabic answers and keeps quiet.

Shut in my room, I hold Caroline tight. I am sometimes tempted to breastfeed her. How I wish milk would flow from my breast! I make her lie next to me and caress her dead black hair. I want her to be demanding, I want her to need me. Only small children can really need help and affection. That’s why we are moved by those who resemble them. I wonder if Jean Luze is capable of crying.

He takes his seat at the table again and looks at Annette with indifference. She’s lost her charm and has become forlorn, when she was always so cheerful. She shows her despondence, it’s awkward. In the evening, Félicia makes an appearance on her husband’s arm.

“Good evening, Annette,” she says, simply.

“Good evening, Félicia.”

There is no doubt about it. She possesses an uncommon moral force that briefly arouses my admiration.

We eat and the conversation revolves around trivial things. We return to the topic of the Feast of the Virgin, the devotional scenes, and the procession.

“Apparently, Madame Camuse will not present a display this year,” Félicia says. “The nuns are preparing one in the entrance of their school. A manger as usual, unfortunately.”

“With a big doll lying on straw,” Annette concludes with a yawn.

Annette is neither pious nor chaste, everyone knows this and she is turning our world upside down with her makeup and her low neckline. She is much too fashionable for this narrow community. She recently pinched Father Paul’s cheek and called him a handsome old man. Fortunately, this happened at home.

Jean Luze is neither more distant nor more friendly toward her than a brother-in-law would be.

“Cigarette?”

He holds out his case. Annette’s cigarette shakes in her hand. She gets up from the table pretending that he’s not offering her a light. She gives herself away. Jean Luze’s attitude is as perfect as hers is false. She suffers and he has simply gone back to being himself.

There is a disturbing vitality in me, made even more dangerous because I’m holding it back. I am like a cunning bedbug lurking in a furniture crevice. I patiently wait to suck the blood of my prey. Jean Luze is my prey now. If he wants, for his own peace and quiet, to settle for his lukewarm marriage, I will manage to prevent him from doing so. For now, he’s on all fours trying to make it up to his wife. He immerses himself in their dull daily routine. But he’s going to get bored with it. I am going to be a great help to him in this matter and a lot more skillfully this time around. I realize there will be much to do. How he hurried back to nestle himself against Félicia’s chaste body! She is so proper, Félicia, so careful, so sensible! I imagine their embrace. I know all there is to know about perfect coitus in theory. I know several pages from Lady Chatterley’s Lover by heart. The book does not leave my nightstand: it’s my aphrodisiac.

Despite the cataclysms, my eyes see the immutable dawn, sky and sea in their colorful splendor. Indifferent to our misfortunes, a merrymaking sky parades in the soft colors of daybreak, and far away the sea, calm, serene, sprawls like a silvery blue sheet of oil. I breathe them in, absorb them with brand-new pleasure, a pleasure so childish it treacherously takes me back to the past. I hear my father’s voice echoing like a drum, the neighing of horses. I hear my mother talking and I hear Augustine, whom my mother has beaten, crying. I hear the piano under my clumsy fingers and my teacher, Mlle Verduré, yelling: “From the top, Claire, take it from the top!” The streets are cheerful. On the doorsteps, groups of men gather. Smoking the day’s first cigar, they share the political news gleaned from Port-au-Prince. The doors of the stores are open. European boats unload their merchandise on the pier, which teems with people of all classes. Vendors walk under our windows calling for their customers. “Madame Clamont,” they say, “I’ve got them here, your rice and beans, chickens and vegetables.” And my mother comes downstairs, leaning on Augustine, and sits on the porch to haggle. What has happened to Mme Bavière’s gorgeous store? And Duclan’s, where they sold French wines, liqueurs and boxes of chocolate of the best French brands? Ruined. One after the other, they went bankrupt. And the Syrians, like vultures, rushed for their remains and bought them up. They’re holding up well, the Syrians. They can compete with Haitians in any weather. “Unfair competition!” my raving father used to insist. “They’ve taken shelter under the wing of the European powers to benefit from their protection…”

“Down with the Syrians! Death to the Syrians,” added Dr. Audier and the other merchants. But it wasn’t the Syrians’ fault if my father lost his coffee fields before his death. His ruin can be chalked up to his fixation on becoming head of state someday. His lands were sold, piece by piece, to pay for ten years of campaigns. And my mother, who watched our dowries fall into the hands of his party activists, would weep in feeble protest.

There are people who let a fortune slip through their fingers and it’s usually not because they are particularly generous. Did he do the right thing, my father, in playing the millionaire in order to stun the masses while satisfying his ambition? It’s all coming back… But I am keeping memory at bay. I could yield to it, to be sure. But for now, I am engrossed only with the present.

Each morning, the Syrians open their stores to reveal displays that have been restocked by the American freighter. Their customers are Calédu, M. Long, the prefect, the mayor, and the few of us who can still afford the luxury of a few ells of fabric. M. Long’s boat supplies them duty-free, people say, because the inspectors have been bought. What’s more, they have also acquired American citizenship, though they barely speak a word of English. “It’s a gang!” Dr. Audier protests, but more and more weakly. With eagle-beak noses pointing from their crafty faces, the “Arabs,” as the common people call them, smile and take root in the country. Jacques Marti predicts their departure.

“The Syrians will throw their sacks on their backs and start on foot for their homeland. Famine is upon us,” he screams, while pacing down the street in big off-balance steps. “We will walk on our knees and we will eat the rocks on the road. Satan rules the town and God has turned his face from us…”

Calédu is getting annoyed. Mme Camuse is right. He will soon accuse Jacques of subversive activity and will have him locked up. He doesn’t like preachers of misfortune and this one is playing his part as only a madman can.

People quickly peer through their blinds.

Everything here happens on the sly. We hide even when we speak.

“Go on, go on, Jacques,” they hiss softly, “tell us about Satan, tell us what he’s like.”

And to their great joy he screams and gesticulates:

“Big, tall, black, with horns, enormous horns, that’s how he is. You be careful, brothers!”

Laughing children surround him.

“Jacques! Jacques!” they cry, throwing stones at him, “are you crazy? Tell us if you’re crazy…”

He runs straight to the police station, and Violette, a prostitute from the stinking back alley, blocks his way.

“Go home,” she advises softly. “That’s better now.”

She takes his hand and he lets her. He seems very happy to walk arm in arm with her.

“Hey there,” Mme Potiron cries out and smacks her rear, “you found yourself a woman, business is good!” [8]

Her whole body shakes in vulgar laughter.

Behind the blinds of my window, I stare at Violette. She is young. She is beautiful. She is free. She spits on us and she is right. I would switch places with her right now.

Leaves are falling from the trees, dancing and swirling in the air before landing flat on the ground. Insomnia has gotten me used to the living breath of the night. I distinguish the sound of each insect or lizard, the movement of each star, every quiver of the earth. I am naked in my bed, damp with sweat, palpitating with desire. A man’s arms hold my body prisoner. He takes me. Is it possible that, a moment later, nothing of this remains? Not a scrap of memory. Oh! The loneliness of suffering! I get dressed and I tiptoe to Annette’s room. She is weeping in the dark. I knock. A voice hoarse from weeping asks who it is. I answer and she opens. I’m no trouble, I am the big dolt, life has rolled off my back without leaving a trace. She starts weeping again in my presence, then says to me:

“What do you want?”

I look at her without a word, then she throws herself on my shoulder.

“If you knew, Claire…”

Be quiet! Don’t waste breath talking, I was telling her in my mind. I know what you feel and I share it. The soul is cumbersome. It wants to meddle in everything. It creates bonds to torture us. Memories are ghosts, at least those that markus. You are like a flower battered by the wind. I want it to carry away your vulgar joys and lift you into a great deadly whirlwind…

“I want to die! I want to die!” she suddenly cries out, with a passion that stuns her.

She rests her haggard, questioning eyes on me. My words have come out of her mouth. How tired she looks. How this love is wearing her out! Her morale is so weak! Jean Luze is not the man for her. The feeling he inspires in her is so strong that she is wasting away. Will she die of it? Too bad! I need her as an intermediary. I am old. I must smell rancid down there, clutching this starving, virgin sex between my legs.

Cry with me. It won’t last long, you’ll see. Trust your charms. You’ve got everything you need to seduce him. You can pierce his armor. He’s proved that much to you. You have to persevere. You are experienced. At fifteen you had a mind of your own, and you were already scrambling for a male. You stole my first fruits. I am going to torture you, torture you both, until I hear you beg for mercy…

“It’s your birthday next month. I will throw a little party. Invite anyone you want…”

“You’re talking to me as if I were a kid,” she protests.

My offer seems childish, but my goal, hardly. I want Annette to get her act together again, I want her to dance and laugh before Jean Luze’s very eyes. I will bring her to the limit of what she can endure. Suffering does not move, it provokes pity or annoys. I, usually so stingy, have now made up my mind to blow a lot of money on this party.

Morning, noon and night, the couple is with us, more united than ever. Félicia revives as her stomach grows more deformed. She is as serene as a statue. Jean Luze eats with a healthy appetite. He doesn’t smoke at the dinner table anymore under the pretext that the smell of tobacco bothers his wife.

“Pregnancy suits you nicely,” he tells her with a kiss.

Each time he shows her affection in my presence, I hate her for settling so easily for this bourgeois, measured feeling she inspires in him.

I swear I will shake him out of its tepid indifference. I will light his fuse. It won’t be too long. I will melt his ice. He looks at us too sweetly, all smiles. I like to see that dimple dig into his chin and his lips curl above his teeth.

The church bells have been ringing incessantly since morning. There I am, dressed as a Daughter of Mary. I look like a nun in the dress Jane Bavière made for me. I can’t reproach her; the worker always tries to please the master. I am the one who insisted on the long sleeves and the high collar. I look rather good, compared to the others in the procession. What a hideous cohort of shriveled old maids! All the same, I am the best among them. All old maids stand out. At least, the real ones do. Not those who, like me, were once torches and have become embers. The tangled webs of veins on their limbs, their pursed lips and darting glances, give them away. The dissatisfaction in their faces is unmistakable. Looking at them, I can’t feel so proud of my part, though I am the leading lady in this spectacle. This pious banner seems heavy to bear. Children’s heads crowned in white are moving in front of me; eyes cast down, they throw handfuls of flowers from their baskets. All the balconies are decorated, and garlands of artificial flowers made by the nuns sway slowly between the trees in the street. This is a festival for the young in which we should not be taking part. The Virgin, radiant, resting on a pedestal carried by four young men, is proof of this. We belong in the ranks of penitents. In the procession, we stand out like grumpy owls [9] in a flock of turtledoves. This is the last time in my life that I will make such a spectacle of myself. We sing Father Paul’s choral arrangement while we wait. “May God above shower us with the goodly rain of His sweet blessing and may His Holy Name be blessed.” Up above, the blows of axes rain upon the trees. It seems to lend rhythm to our hymn. The prefect and the mayor, clad in their gray wool suits, sweating blood and water, watch the procession go by and cross themselves before the Holy Sacrament. Calédu and M. Long stand outside the door of the Cercle. The priest blesses them all. Jacques the madman comes running.

“The gates of hell have opened their mouth to devour you,” he screams, flailing. “God has cursed us. He has opened the gates of hell upon us…”

The singing dies down. Calédu frowns. He brings a whistle to his mouth, and Jacques the madman screams again, pointing at him.

“Look out, Father, a demon!”

Calédu rushes up and grabs him by the collar. Face contorted in hate, he starts slapping him.

“Quiet, you!”

“Satan!” Jacques yells.

Then Calédu pulls his revolver from his belt and shoots the lunatic point-blank. Jacques falls to his knees without a protest.

The procession stops abruptly. In the silence, you can only hear the crying of the children in the first row. Some of the nuns clutch their rosaries in their shaking hands. Others clench them convulsively. We are standing, bodies stiff in a kind of hypnotic trance. But Jacques, red with blood, begins to crawl toward us, scraping the earth with his nails. Holding his head up, he moves slowly, painfully Dr. Audier, sweat pouring down his face, takes a step toward him, but a bullet whistling near his feet nails him to the ground, terrified.

The pharmacist twirls his hat in his hands mechanically. He spins it faster and faster as if his movements are not in his control. The women have hidden their faces in their kerchiefs; the nuns, eyes turned to heaven, drone a Pater Noster. The beggars lying on the ground are watching the scene without moving.

I see Joël Marti turn his head to the right and to the left, as if looking for help. With bulging eyes, he points at his brother, who has just collapsed face-first on the ground. He wants to go to him. Someone holds him back.

“Don’t move,” Calédu yells.

He steps back, smoking gun in his fist, as we remain frozen in place.

Father Paul then whispers something to the choir children, and in an instant, he is surrounded by a halo of incense. Raising the monstrance over his head, framed by the choir children, he walks up to Calédu.

“And now,” he says, “I ask for your permission to perform my priestly duties.”

The buzz of prayer becomes more intense.

Still walking backward, the commandant makes an impatient movement with his left hand to indicate his total indifference, and disappears around the corner.

This was the signal for a mad dash. The trembling nuns gathered their students. Men, women, and children rushed home. Dr. Audier and his wife followed me into our living room. We then told the entire story to Jean Luze and Félicia, whom we had awakened from their nap.

Crowding behind partly opened blinds, we watched Joël Marti, who was weeping over the body.

Jean Luze glanced at Dr. Audier’s sweaty face.

“Are you sure he is dead?” he asked. “That there is nothing more that can be done?”

“I will find out later.”

“Later!” Jean Luze cried out, “later indeed, while you stay here trembling with fear!”

“Hush! Calm down, dear,” Félicia said softly.

“It’s none of my business. It’s not up to me to stand up to your district commandant. This is your home, not mine. It is not the responsibility of a passing stranger to reform a place where he does not belong.”

He raised his voice and we trembled even more.

“Hush!” Dr. Audier said in his turn, with a glance to the porch.

“You have to protest, respond to this with a demonstration, face the danger together. They would never destroy an entire town. These murders, these tortures, are meant to terrorize you. But let one person here lead an uprising and the other side will tremble…”

“You don’t understand anything,” Dr. Audier said laconically, softly resting his trembling hand on Jean Luze’s arm.

Mme Audier was weeping and blowing her nose loudly.

Jean Luze opened the door of the living room with a gesture of unconcealed anger and went out. We saw him help Joël Marti carry Jacques’ body away, holding the feet awkwardly.

***

Jacques is dead. He was buried today. A few poets came out of their holes and carried his coffin to the cemetery in silence, heads lowered. Policemen and beggars were posted along the route. Violette followed the cortège with some flowers in her arms. As for the others, myself among them, we stayed behind locked doors, sitting quietly at home.

Jean Luze shows contempt in his eyes and in his smile. He can’t forgive our cowardice, reproaching us for it in every visible way. Each expression is a slap in our faces.

“Are you really that afraid to die?” he asked that evening of Dr. Audier, who accepts these insults in the detached manner of an experienced old man putting up with an impetuous son.

“You still haven’t understood a thing,” the doctor replied. “Fear is a vice that takes root once it is cultivated. It takes time to recover from it.”

Jean Luze shrugged.

“Who can boast that he has never been afraid?” he shot back at Audier. “At least you have been spared from war. As for me, I bear its mark on my body and soul forever.”

His eyes darkened. He was reliving the pieces of his life he preferred to keep to himself.

“But don’t you find hatred between compatriots to be even more horrid?” the doctor asked softly.

“What do you think France went through in 1789?” he retorted. “And let me stop you before you say that our cutthroats fought for an idea, for an ideal. What does all your suffering amount to? Maybe the goal escapes me. That’s why I’m afraid to put myself forward, to side with one party against another. Where does this hatred between you come from?”

“It is the end result of a long sequence of historical facts,” Dr. Audier declared, combing a hand through his white silky hair. “The hatred became swollen and toxic, and had to be punctured in the end like an abscess.”

“Without a scalpel?”

“You always need a scalpel to drain an abscess,” Dr. Audier added. “I am seventy years old and I have lived through plenty of things in this country. Our past is full of rebellions, we have seen days beyond description during which everyone, like the musketeers of old, demanded revenge for the least insult. Weapons were lightly drawn and men braved death just as lightly. I am more or less the last man of a dead generation. Maybe we deserve what we are going through.”

“Do you feel so guilty that you would just casually absolve those who persecute you?” Jean Luze asked.

“My dear young man, I have enough experience to know when to keep quiet and to keep the full range of my thoughts to myself.”

“Forgive me, I did not mean to pry”

“Don’t apologize. You are not so much curious about what I think, but about what could have brought us to hang our heads and resign ourselves.”

He opened the door of the living room and studied the street.

“Look!” he said. “Calédu is rounding up the poets. They dared pay their respects to an executed suspect and he’s using the occasion to get these so-called conspirators. Well, and take a look here: Monsieur Long is standing in front of his factory. He’s watching as if he were a mere spectator. And yet I wouldn’t be surprised if he was intimately involved.”

“Aren’t you exaggerating somewhat?” Jean Luze asked, skeptical.

“Look at things a bit more carefully and I am sure you’ll see I’m right,” Audier answered.

Félicia smiled, more serene than ever.

“He’s crazy,” she later explained to her husband, “his wife said so. In times like these, many of us need a scapegoat to excuse our own cowardice. The only guilty ones are these blacks who have been sent here to make us submit. They only associate with Monsieur Long because they hope to make money. As if money were everything!”

“Oh my wife, my dear wife,” Jean Luze said, “you are such a sectarian!”

“What do you expect?” she said to him, “you can’t snap your fingers and erase the mark of your entire upbringing.”

Down at the very end of Grand-rue, in that miserable back alley full of old rickety shacks, mothers wept as they watched their sons being handcuffed.

The days went by. The people’s misery grew. To each his own lot. Selfishness becomes our way of life. We wallow in cowardice and resignation. Here I am, more than ever in love with my sister’s husband, and I want to think of nothing else but this love. It is turning into my refuge, my consolation. Félicia is again so sure of herself, so confident in her man, that she embraced Annette on her birthday. They gave her perfume and rice powder. Drench yourself in perfume and powder, I’m not afraid of anything anymore, Jean Luze’s smile seems to say. We’ll see.

These last few days, I have seen Annette lie in wait for him in vain, at the top of the stairs, in the living room, by the door of her room. He has managed to foil her schemes without even noticing them. She does not know what else she can come up with to seduce him. Yesterday, she came out of her bedroom in a bathing suit she made herself and, under the pretext that she was unable to close the bra, she placed herself in Jean Luze’s capable hands. She met with a friendly tap on the shoulder and the following words:

“There you go!” was the entire outcome.

I hated him at that moment. I felt as if all this trouble was for nothing.

He is more elusive than ever. His attitude is outrageous by its very excess of correctness. You had me once, but I won’t fall back in your nets, he wants Annette to understand. This is neither a game nor flirtation on his part. In one fell swoop, he has swept memory clean. What is desire, then, if it cannot be rekindled once it’s been satisfied? How would I handle being pushed away? Was life trying to spare me until now by keeping me away from these kinds of disappointing realities? Am I provoking it by desperately throwing myself into an adventure with no exit? My feelings for this man have taken so much space in my life that I can’t free myself from them. Nothing seems to move him. It could make a woman lose her mind. Annette had Bob kiss her right before his eyes to provoke him. He gazed at them with sweet indolence, like an angel, which was worse than a slap in the face.

Bravo for Father Paul! Bravo for Eugénie Duclan! It rained yesterday. A torrential deluge that lasted four hours. The weather hasn’t improved since. Fat dirty gray clouds hang like rags in the sky. We wade through the mud puddles like pigs. The potholed streets have become ponds. The indifferent ship loads the wood piled high on the pier. Business on that end is booming. M. Long, red as a rooster, manages the operation himself. The peasants have faces like whipped dogs. They sulk and hold out their hands for their payment as they look away into the distance at the devastated hillside. Huge white patches have spread on the mountain like leprosy. Immense rocks stick out of its sides like gravestones. They stand there, dressed in union blues, barefoot, their halforts [10] across their shoulders, faces twisted with displeasure.

“Our land is finished,” one of them says. “We cut down too many trees.”

“I said don’t do it! Don’t do it!” cries another. “We should have created a coalition and refused all offers. But black hill folk [11] never stick together. They are weak with the white men and the bourgeois. Here comes the rain again and our land is finished. The American is getting rich and the others with him. They are all against us.”

The mayor and the prefect accompany M. Long to the office, a small building with the following inscription: LONG & CO., EXPORT CORP. This is where Jean Luze spends long days bent over paperwork. He knows all of their secrets. Senior accountant, such is his title, and he keeps track of the numbers, his handsome face bent over their books.

No one suspects him. He’s a white man. And a white man can only side with M. Long. He hears them talking. And he learns a great deal from the time spent with them.

I watch for Jean Luze from my windows. It is four and he should be returning from work. I’m holding the paper knife he gave me yesterday, saying:

“You spoil me, so I’ll spoil you too. No, it’s true, you’re a grand girl. Look at this, it’s from Mexico. It’s a dagger. One of the best. Something to remember me by.”

“Are you leaving?”

“One never knows!…”

He’s not happy. How can we possibly hold on to him? If he leaves, what will become of me? How do we change things here? For the first time in my life, I shall redouble my efforts toward the common cause. I will transform this place into the piece of paradise he has yearned for.

I’m playing my last card. Tonight is the ball in honor of Annette’s birthday, which was three days ago. For this, I have overcome my repugnance and made the most awful concession. The commandant, the mayor, the Trudors and their son Paul, who is home on vacation, will be among our guests. I think I may have shaken Calédu’s hand without realizing it.

Many guests, Corrine Laplanche among them, were already in the living room when Annette made her entrance in a blue dress that revealed her shoulders down to her back.

In my opinion Corrine Laplanche is as distinguished as any society lady. Pretty in a tasteful, long-sleeved dress of white crêpe, she leaned toward me to say:

“I am Corrine Laplanche, Élina Jean-François’ daughter. My mother often spoke of you. You were schoolmates, I think.”

I shook her hand with a smile.

“Who is that?” Mme Camuse asked me while teasing the pleat of her black taffeta blouse.

“The daughter of a schoolmate: Élina Jean-François.”

“Jean-François! I once knew a blind man of that name who delivered our poultry and pigs. Is that the same family?”

“Yes.”

“Oh that Annette! Unbelievable! I suppose one can either give in or stay home. Cattle breeders and rastaquouères [12] in our living rooms! Now I’ve seen it all…”

The remark conjured up an Annette I’d never before imagined, a brave rock-slinger leaping over the barricades with the agility of youth.

This is what I thought as I looked at them: Mme Audier, Mme Camuse, Eugénie Duclan were gathered near the table to better stuff themselves with cakes. Augustine, white apron around her plaid dress, came and went among the guests, eyes lowered, anonymous and ageless. The young people chatted and danced, the girls in long dresses, the men in dark suits with roses in the buttonholes. Calédu stood out in his khaki uniform. Where was he concealing his weapons? In my little corner I felt frightfully old and out of fashion, and I tried with terrible force of will to forget myself and identify myself wholly with Annette. I saw her offering her cheeks for friends to kiss, receiving presents, drinking Rum Russians. She was only doing it for him. This was exactly what I wanted from her. He sat beside Félicia on the sofa smoking. She was rapt, immersed in his affection. The harmony of their life together was there for all to see. Would they prevail? After her third rum, Annette danced with the son of the prefect, a handsome and rather elegant dandy who plastered his black cheek onto hers. With this she began flirting in a way that appeared to leave Jean Luze completely indifferent. She then danced several times with Calédu. I was astonished to see him execute the latest merengues quite gracefully I think he searched me out in the crowd, just before he approached.

“Would you care to dance, Miss Clamont?”

Why Miss? Has he really become so Americanized since keeping company with M. Long?

“Thank you, but I don’t like to dance,” I answered coldly.

“With me, you will.”

And, wrapping an authoritative arm around me, he twirled me until I was dizzy. His hands seemed to possess such prodigious strength that I felt like my whole body was locked in a vise. I tried to free myself. He tightened his grip. Our two bodies intertwined and seethed with hatred. Suddenly I stopped short and his feet awkwardly caught mine. I tore my hand from his.

“Tired?” he asked to save face.

But the look in his eyes belied the worldly smile playing on his lips, and I understood that only then had he realized the extent of my hatred for him.

“I have heard, Miss Clamont,” he whispered wickedly, “that in the old days a bloody incident took place up there on your land, on Lion Mountain. So it seems you and I both have killing on our conscience. Mine doesn’t bother me much. Does yours?”

Once again, he danced with Annette. Keeping his eyes on me, mouth against her ear, he whispered words I could not hear and the ninny listened smiling. He then danced with all of our guests, pretty and ugly alike. He seemed to pride himself on his uniform, on his position of authority, which easily opened doors no matter how tightly sealed. The worldly executioner in full! His murderer’s hands wrapped themselves around ladies’ waists, shook the hands of others. We were humoring him, hoping to be spared! I turned my eyes away so as not to betray myself, but this performance of his, shoved in my face, in my own home, had reinforced my hatred and contempt…

Toward midnight, Annette was drunk enough to demand that Jean Luze dance with her. He begged off, then, encouraged by Félicia, he accepted. Once again, there he was holding her in his arms. I focused my attention on this graceful vision and found in it a version of the hatred the commandant inspired in me. I scrutinized Jean Luze’s impassive face. Forgetting herself, Annette closed her eyes. I suddenly saw her grab his head in order to kiss him on the lips. He drew away quickly, and stared at her unsmiling:

“Are you out of your mind?” he said.

She bowed her head just as I did.

From that moment, nothing mattered to me anymore. There I was in my corner, incapable of thought, incapable of desire, half-dead with depression and despair. I saw people walking, heard them talking, all of it in a dream. Nevertheless, for a brief instant I caught Calédu’s eyes on me; I rose and left our guests for my room, double-locking the door in my rage.

***

I couldn’t sleep a wink. On account of what Calédu said. Who told him about us? Are we losing our pride and our solidarity to such an extent that we betray one another out of fear? Who was so indecent as to stir up the ashes of the past? To resurrect after so many years the bloody incident at Lion Mountain? Don’t they realize they are giving our enemies ammunition against us? Ammunition they will use to humiliate, shame and force us to capitulate even further. As for me, nothing will make me bow my head. I will never yield. Even if they club me, even if they torture me as they did Dora, I will hold my head high. I alone will never give in. I refuse to make my peace with this. I refuse to get used to this. I would rather stand with our old dodos and acquiesce to Mme Camuse though I dislike her behavior. Did they have to appoint such hateful and spectacularly criminal people to reform our backward little town? We’re on, Commandant! Whatever you may think, you are up against a strong opponent. Our hatred is mutual. Bless this love that imprisons me, praise be to Jean Luze the Frenchman who enthralls me so much that nothing matters apart from my love. You may be all bluster strutting about like a walking arsenal, but I’m smart enough to hide my game and look harmless to you. And therein lies my strength. I am patient, whereas you, like all fools, are impulsive. I wrap myself in the dignity of an old family line, as I nurse my serpent’s venom. You spread your cruelty, I know how to hide mine. You bite, I sting-stealthily, my eye trained by a bourgeois education, imbibed like mother’s milk, which makes me the most cunning of enemies. I wait for my moment. Because for now, love saves me from hatred.

Every evening, Annette comes home from Bob Charivi’s store more or less drunk. No matter how much I pull on the bridle, she completely escapes my control. I stopped by her room during her absence and saw a bottle of sleeping pills on her table. She drugs herself to sleep. I slosh about blindly in the darkness of my thoughts. I frighten myself. Seeking distraction, I pay a visit to Mme Camuse. I find her in bed, Eugénie Duclan by her side.

“It’s nothing,” says Mme Camuse, “a bad flu.”

At her request, I run out to get some turpentine at Charles Farus’, and we rub it on her back and chest. She then clamors for cat’s-tongue tea, [13] recommending that I close my eyes when I pick out the three leaves to boil, as prescribed by local superstition.

“A terrible epidemic is upon us!” Eugénie Duclan sighs. “The rain will not cease. God has heeded our prayers, but the sun cannot dry our puddles. Yesterday, six children died of typhoid-malaria. There is no more medicine at the hospital and no nurses either.”

Mme Camuse shifts in her bed.

“We must pray, call upon our blessed dead to help us, our land is in agony,” she tells us.

She turns to me and takes the boiling tea.

“Claire,” she says to me, “have you been to your parents’ grave? It looks abandoned! I can forgive Félicia and Annette for neglecting it; they barely knew them, but you… the eldest daughter…”

How is this any of her business? Does she think I’m still the pushover she once knew? I kiss her and take my leave without responding.

“You’re upset with me?” she asks. “I saw you come into the world, your mother was my friend and my son once loved you. How can you forget this?”

No, I have forgotten nothing. My memories are intact but she will know nothing of them.

“I am not upset, Madame Camuse.”

Eugénie Duclan stares at me with veiled malevolence.

“You don’t look good either,” she adds. “We’re getting old, I’m afraid, you, Dora and I, without husbands, without children.”

“People say that you are still after that scruffy pharmacist,” Mme Camuse says to her. “You’re not going to marry him, are you, Eugénie? Impossible. To think that you, the daughter of Edgar Duclan, could marry the illegitimate son of a black woman and a nameless mulatto.”

“That’s better than staying an old maid,” Eugénie replies, avoiding my gaze.

Ten years she’s been hanging on to Charles Farus, a griffe we knew nothing about until recently. He baptized his shack “Grande Pharmacie de la Grand-Rue.” He seemed rather fond of the adjective. This is now our only pharmacy, since a fire destroyed Dr. Audier’s. With its dusty shelves, its jars stuffed with camphor and naphthalene balls, it looks, as Jean Luze once described it, like a field hospital. Charles Farus could fix it up but he refuses to do so, blaming hurricanes for having ruined him once too many times. A former usurer, he has, some say, a small fortune he keeps stashed, like old Grandet, [14] at the bottom of a trunk, where he can count and contemplate it at his leisure. Who knows if his reputation as a rich man has not played some part in Eugénie’s decision. Also, it may be his connections. I have often seen him in the company of Calédu and the other men in charge. There was a time when his kind would never be received in our homes, so he must be gloating at the fact that a nearly destitute scion of one of our best families is now at his mercy. It’s hard to believe that Eugénie and I were once inseparable. How people do change! Not in character, because the core is immutable, but in taste. Luckily, mine has become refined with age.

Mme Camuse smirked at her with displeasure and gestured to me:

“Take these flowers,” she said. “They’re from the nuns’ altar, Father Paul offered them to me yesterday. They are still fresh, bring them to your parents. They were strict, it’s true. But look at what a perfect girl you are! And anyway, no point displeasing the dead, is there?”

I accept her flowers without thanking her and leave. The cemetery is not far. I walk there. The headstone is half buried in wild grass. I look around before throwing the flowers the way one throws a bone to a dog. Anyway, I will have the grave weeded and whitewashed so as not to invite criticism.

I turn to my doll for comfort, cradling her behind my locked door. Life has deprived me of the joys of motherhood, and a wealth of maternal love ferments within me. What crime have I committed to make me undeserving of such happiness? Maybe it’s not too late. Who wants to sleep with me? Who wants to knock me up? Free. No strings attached. No more bargaining… Well, I put on a good show. I’ll never have the courage. Besides, I am the kind of woman who does the choosing. My choice is Jean Luze. I hate my tired eyes, my first streaks of gray, and the wrinkles on my forehead. A star streaked across the sky and I wished on it. I sometimes feel like a monster. What am I running away from that I so drunkenly welcome this glimmer of love in my life? Maybe it is not merely unhappiness or my hatred for Calédu. I know that a battle has begun in me, and that, all the same, I will have to make a choice one day. What vocation calls me? How would I understand and follow the call? I am still rebellious. Just seeing Dora makes my blood boil, and not too long ago when the mayor shook my hand after mass, I almost laughed in his face.

“He is a joke, our little mayor,” Mme Camuse muttered in my ear that day. “He looks like a cheap sausage stuffed into that wool jacket. Look at the prefect’s wife! She’s got four bracelets on her fat arms and has hung a couple of chandeliers from her ears. Does she think she’s at a ball?”

She has kept her aristocratic lexicon. She’s not about to change at seventy-five. The sight of the Cercle occupied by armed beggars made her heartsick.

“They have taken over everything!” she groans. “Ah! Our good old days are really good and gone!”

There was a time when she ruled our district in high style, when she made her servants beat the drum and light the flame, when she organized cocktail parties at l’Étoile, when she presided at table opposite her late husband, who was dressed in his most elegant frock coat, when she angrily scratched out from the guest list names that were outrageously nouveau riche. Her time is no more. Annette and her peers have resigned themselves to this. Mme Camuse and Mme Audier think Annette is little more than a hussy. “A hussy,” they murmur to each other in the intimacy of their living room now sullied by the boots of Commandant Calédu and by the exceedingly shiny new shoes of the mayor and the prefect. It’s a cold war of resentment, rancor and hatred.

***

This morning, I brought Félicia her soup. Her belly is spilling out of her maternity blouse: a veritable sperm whale!

“Claire, my dearest,” she said to me, “Jean and I have chosen you to be godmother to our son.”

I smile and thank her. In my own fashion.

“Are you happy?”

“Of course I’m happy.”

I don’t want a child who is only a quarter mine. I want one who is completely mine. I don’t want to get attached to other people’s children. Even though life has denied me everything, I am not inclined to play the adoptive mother. I may kiss Jane’s son on his nice round cheeks but I remain detached, the door to my heart as solidly barricaded as the door to my bedroom.

Dr. Audier will be the godfather, naturally. He has served as witness to every wedding and stood godfather to every child born to the decent families, more or less. I will have a pleasant fellow godparent. A good guy, this doctor, who, despite his time in Paris, remained a classic Haitian country doctor to the core. He still forgets to tie his shoes and close his fly. Always a wet cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth; one time, by accident, some ash fell on Félicia’s belly. He’s the doctor the Luzes trusts, just as he was the one we trusted in the old days. In any case, we are hardly overwhelmed with options. And isn’t a doctor who studied in France something like a specialist? He continues to visit us every eight days, accompanied by his wife always caked in powder whiter than Pierrot. Does she still get her Antiphelic Milk [15] by the case from Paris? No, for the French ships have deserted our ports. “My God,” she would moan coyly, “my complexion is getting darker!”… She is all honey when she talks to the prefect and all honey with Calédu as well. “Commandant,” she once said to him, “the uniform really suits you.”

For the moment, she feels obliged to moan like a polecat over the layette of the expected newborn.

Jean Luze chats with Dr. Audier. They dredge up memories of Paris. How and when the conversation turns, I can’t say. I only hear Dr. Audier answer:

“Yes, I am taking care of Dora Soubiran just as I have taken care of all the women beaten by Calédu. I suspect we’re dealing with a sadist who is avenging himself for his impotence with women. At least that’s my suspicion, because he’s also a bitter man who may simply be punishing others for their social status. His choice of victims reveals that much.”

“Why not complain?” Jean Luze asks.

“To whom?” Audier replies. “To the people who sent him to purge this town?”

“But how is it possible that there’s nothing you can do!”

“So you still don’t get it,” Dr. Audier said with despair. “People are right to say that no matter how educated they may be, foreigners can barely understand us even if they watch how we live for a hundred years.”

“I think I’ve understood quite a few things,” Jean Luze replies smiling, “but what astonishes and disgusts me a little, I confess, is the well-behaved fatalism with which you pull down your breeches for the lash. I see around me neither revolt nor even the semblance of revolt, nothing that would show your discontent.”

“You are wrong. This region is caught in the line of terror. But maybe this is just for the time being. We Haitians have earned our independence in a way few nations can boast. We are still a very young nation. Maybe we find it normal to take the lash, as you say, from time to time. The response will come. In good time, it will come, believe me…”

“I won’t be around for that, unfortunately.”

“You”-Dr. Audier shook his finger at him-“the Export Corporation isn’t keeping you on.”

“My contract expires in three months. I’ve saved up quite a bit…”

He mops the sweat from his brow and smiles.

“I am going to lose it, I know it.”

Félicia looks at him without a word.

She will accept whatever he wishes. She, too, would follow him to the ends of the earth.

***

Félicia is decidedly better. I miss her illness, which provided so many excuses to intrude on their privacy. I would see Jean Luze in his pajamas, lying under the sheets, dreaming or sleepy. Once, on purpose, I opened the door of their bedroom without knocking. He was in boxer shorts.

“Hey, watch it, Claire,” he cried out with glee, “or your eyes will melt.”

And laughing, he threw on some pants.

That very day, in fact, Félicia talked to me about Annette.

“There are things that went on here,” she told me, “that my husband and I wish to keep to ourselves, Claire darling, and besides, it is useless to trouble you with such secrets… Annette worries me. The life she leads scandalizes even Jean. Because you have been a mother to her, I think it falls to you to question and advise her. Did you know she comes home every night after two?”

“She goes out with her friends, at least that’s what she tells me.”

“She gets drunk. She’s too young to lead such a life. Madame Audier, with all the tact she could muster, has told me that her reputation is compromised. If there were to be a scandal, God forbid, it would also reflect on us. Our parents left us an unblemished name, and Annette is sullying it.”

I took all of this in without adding anything. She must have thought this was more than I could handle.

So it was for fear of scandal that she has agreed to reconcile with Annette! It was for fear of scandal that she turned the page so quickly and that she tolerated the rival in her midst? It is true that we have equal title to this house and it would fall to her to leave this house, since Jean Luze has a good job. But she’s practical and she must have thought of everything: her health is fragile and she’s a bad housekeeper. Leaving the house would mean losing her housekeeper, the godmother-to-be she had planned on wringing like a sponge, the all-purpose old maid who will wipe her son’s ass while she pets her man. She’s thought things through. She is so afraid to aggravate things between her and Annette that she wants to use me as a screen. I will not be anyone’s screen. Annette is free. Let her float her own boat where she pleases. I won’t say a word to her. I’d rather lecture that hypocrite Mme Audier. No one can ever please her. She has a forked tongue that’s grown more venomous with age, though Father Paul lays the body of Christ on it once a month. A true pillar of the church, always devoted to the Holy Virgin or to Saint Jude, always airing everybody’s dirty laundry or simply inventing things to make conversation. She has always been a public menace, a seemingly harmless monster in great demand in idle circles. I have heard stories about her that are not so funny and behind closed doors my mother accused her of writing anonymous letters to cuckolded husbands to open their eyes. With Félicia, she plays the respectable woman condemning this one or the other. But a woman like her, overflowing with vitality and imagination even at sixty-five, it’s hard to see her settling only for her Jules. Or if she did settle it was only for fear of scandal.

From my room, I can hear the Creole mutterings of our Augustine, who has served the Clamonts for thirty years-the past ten of them for me, Claire the abolitionist, who claims to be restoring justice to the kingdom of this world, at least in my own modest way. I pay her, whereas she worked for my parents for free. What more can she possibly want? Perhaps she finds solace in talking to herself, but I don’t want her spittle on my dishes. We are both crabby. Does she also live without a man? What’s bothering this poor ignorant black woman from the hills? We live with daggers drawn. She is careless and I am obsessive. A character flaw in old maids-although I know that a few of us do live like pigs. I am enraged by a speck of dust. I sniff the tableware and the dishes with suspicion, something that exasperates her; I ignore her petty thefts. I am not naïve: a servant is faithful when it is in her interest.

“You’re poisoning everything,” Félicia protests when I chase mosquitoes from the nooks and corners of the house with DDT.

Like all idle women, she is a member of the live-and-let-live school of housekeeping, and thinks that everything is in order just because she’s embroidering clothes for her future child.

The truth is that tracking down dust distracts me. And what’s more, I take pride in being an impeccable housekeeper. When Jean Luze’s ash falls on the carpet, I go down on my knees to pick it up. Since his wife’s pregnancy I am the one who mends all of his clothes, and he turns to me for this more and more.

“Claire, can you sew this button, please?”

And there I am, caressing the fly of his pants where I am sewing the button. He thanks me by letting his gaze linger on me. His eyes are like precious stones in a velvet box. I will adore the wee one if he ends up looking like him, and that will be my cross, to fight a feeling I would rather suppress out of pride.

“Drink less and try to lead a decent life,” Félicia said severely to Annette this morning.

“What do you mean by a decent life?” she replied with impertinence.

“Félicia is giving you advice for your own good,” I added for good measure.

“Ah!”

Her butterfly-wing eyes flashed and she took the bottle of rum to pour herself another glass.

Jean Luze looked at her coldly, as if making an effort to conceal his disapproval, his contempt! He does not love her, it’s unmistakable. It’s true she has been acting like a little whore. Beautiful as she is, a man like him will never love her. And yet, how many love affairs he must have had! Maybe that’s what has made him choosy. All the easy conquests probably made him wary. He knows what he can expect from women. Maybe that’s why he picked the blandest of the three, the least interesting sister.

It was two in the morning and I was in deep sleep when someone knocked on my door. It was Jean Luze. Worried and distressed, he begged me to come help Félicia. She was wet with sweat and writhing in pain.

“We need Dr. Audier,” I said to him.

Jean Luze left, and in silence I put away the clothes draped on the furniture. Félicia moaned, crying and calling out to me:

“It hurts, Claire, oh how it hurts!”

A moment later, Dr. Audier, hurrying as much as his bent little feet and paunch permitted, was leaning over my sister.

“She’s in labor,” he declared to Jean Luze.

“But she’s only seven months along!” Jean Luze exclaimed without hiding his anxiety.

Audier tilted his head before responding:

“Many a powerful man was born before term!”

Jean Luze bent over his wife. He pressed her against him with infinite tenderness and wiped her brow:

“Be brave,” he said to her.

“Boil some water, Claire,” the doctor ordered me, “and have some clean linen ready.”

And turning to Jean Luze:

“You leave the room,” the doctor said softly. “She’ll hold up better if you are not here. The husband’s presence always complicates things.”

“Claire, don’t leave her,” he begged me.

“What’s going on?” Annette yelled from the landing.

“Félicia is having the baby,” Jean Luze answered.

“The baby!” she exclaimed, appalled.

I ran to the pantry to wake up Augustine. We boiled water and we took out sheets and bath towels from the armoires.

“Poor Madame Luze!” Augustine sighed. “How she suffers!”

Does she love us? Does she at least love my young sisters, who came into the world and grew up before her very eyes? In a prominent family, what is the place of a house slave who called the babies mademoiselle and conceded to their every whim for fear of being beaten? Jean Luze is more polite and respectful to her than we are.

She came and went, her black face sullen, responding to Félicia’s moans.

“Here, Mademoiselle Claire,” she told me, “here is the boiling water; it must be taken to Madame’s room.”

Holding Félicia’s hand, wiping her sweaty face, I felt my heart contract with bitterness: she was the one bringing Jean Luze’s son into the world.

In the living room, he and Annette were alone. That thought helped me forgive Félicia, who, instead of me, was about to bring the man I loved one of the greatest joys in his life.

The labor was turning out to be difficult. I stayed by Félicia’s bedside until six in the morning. Jean Luze was so nervous that he was not able to eat anything. Annette suddenly started acting mysteriously. I can’t tell if something’s happened between them.

Before my eyes my sister’s body was drawn and quartered. She was moaning and screaming as I patiently wiped her forehead.

“Claire! Claire!” she cried, hanging on to me.

Toward seven o’clock, she let loose an awful hoarse scream, and Dr. Audier, leaning in, cigarette at the corner of his mouth, welcomed the child onto the great mahogany bed where my mother had given birth to her three daughters in his care.

“It’s a boy” he told me.

He was so ugly I was sure I could never love him.

“And Félicia?” Jean Luze asked, opening the bedroom door.

“Everything went well,” Dr. Audier replied. “Wait a little before coming in.”

The child breathed feebly, half-purple. The doctor slapped his bottom and plunged him in warm water. He wriggled, then screamed.

“Give me some cotton, Claire,” Audier said to me. “I need a lot of cotton.”

He made him lie on a thick layer of cotton bedding and wrapped him in a blanket.

“He’s small,” he added, “keeping him warm will help.”

***

The news about the baby is alarming. Audier can’t promise anything. Félicia of course knows nothing. She is more serene than ever, patiently drawing milk from her swollen breasts with a pump. She got up today for the first time, doctor’s orders, and she took a few steps around the room. Jean Luze forces himself to smile for her. Fortunately, she’s noticed nothing! What a temperament! She’s stuffed with straw. She’s a scarecrow. I know this man’s every expression and can predict every reaction. How can she not sense his mortal fear? She eats with great appetite while he barely touches anything, though I myself take the trouble to prepare his favorite food. For him, Annette is as nonexistent as I am. He doesn’t even see her anymore. He lives in perpetual anguish, an anguish so overwhelming that it steals him away from me. He doesn’t even listen to music. He doesn’t care for anything. Yesterday, when he was in the living room smoking a pipe, I went in on tiptoes to put a Beethoven concerto on the turntable. He hardly listened for a minute, before getting up to worry over the baby still swaddled in cotton and more ugly than a little monkey.

Being spurned is making Annette sick. She seems to suffer as much as I do. She worries me. I forced her to live too intensely. She is not used to suffering and it has torn her apart: she looks like a madwoman in her eccentric dresses and her excessive makeup. She doesn’t eat anymore. Jean Luze doesn’t even seem to notice her absence at the dinner table. The tension is straining my nerves. Does his whole world consist of Félicia and the little runt she gave birth to?

There are guests in the living room. Eugénie Duclan and her pharmacist are among them. It so happens I have a prescription from Dr. Audier for Félicia. I give it to Charles Farus, who adjusts his glasses to decipher it. He shakes his head: no, he doesn’t have this medicine; it will have to be sent for from Port-au-Prince. Then what’s the use of your pharmacy? I want to scream at him. There they are, just about all of them, and all anxious to find out whether Félicia is dead or alive, how big the baby is. It’s obvious they are seeking entertainment and especially gossip. One can tell by their faces. They must be counting months, figuring out the dates. Jean Luze tries his best to be pleasant. They seem intimidated and even flattered to be shaking his hand. An inferiority complex? A foreigner has always represented the height of perfection in our eyes. He has always had the reputation of being rich, happy, knowing everything better than us. He opens our eyes on new horizons and unveils a mysterious, unknown world to us.

Eugénie Duclan offers her arm to the partly arthritic Charles Farus. Things do seem to be going swell for them. I have a feeling that soon we will see this forty-year-old sister go down the church aisle with this pharmacist, who, thanks to illness and old age, will end up using her as a nurse at the store.

“So, the news is good?” Eugénie insists.

“The news is good,” Jean Luze affirms.

“God be praised!”

“God be praised!” he acquiesces, imperturbable.

She is dressed in a starched skirt that makes her look like a puffed-up turkey. He is wearing a greenish alpaca suit and is clutching a grimy panama hat.

“Oh for the love of God,” Jean Luze sighs after their departure. “It’s like they stepped out of a painting from another century.”

That makes me smile.

Then, Mme Camuse comes. She disregards the doctor’s orders and walks right into the Luzes’ room without even a present in her hand.

“You! You, Félicia Clamont, my own goddaughter! I would have never thought! Madame Audier has taken it upon herself to spread the news that you got married pregnant, my girl.”

“What does it matter, godmother,” she responds, “as long as I am married?” And she exchanges a complicit little smile with her husband that would have made a saint green with envy.

Audier has reassured us. The baby will make it. He finally took him out of his cotton cocoon. Jean Luze calmed down a bit. My nerves loosened, otherwise they might have snapped.

Unfortunately, that’s when Annette decided to try to commit suicide.

That evening, when I opened her door, I found her deep in sleep, moaning as if she was in pain. I called Jean Luze and without saying anything, pointed to the empty bottle of sleeping pills. He frowned and bent over her, taking Annette’s head in his hands. Her magnificent black hair ran through his fingers unnoticed.

“What have you done? What have you done now, for God’s sake,” he cried out.

He patted her face clumsily, and then turned to me:

“I’m going to get Dr. Audier,” he told me.

He let her head fall just as clumsily and left running.

Upon his return, he stopped briefly in the living room to talk to Audier. He whispered something I didn’t hear. I then heard the doctor’s voice very clearly.

“These kinds of girls, you know, take nothing seriously; life is all theater for them.”

“Yes, but I can’t stand these cracked-up women living only by their feelings,” Jean Luze replied. “Isn’t there a way to calm them down, to fix them? Surely there must be an appropriate treatment…”

“As long as they accept treatment, yes, one can help them: nymphomania can be treated. All you need is the patient’s cooperation.”

The tone with which Dr. Audier uttered his last words was worse than an insult. He followed us into Annette’s room, took the empty bottle that Jean Luze handed to him, looked at it for a moment and then put it on the table:

“I’m going to pump her stomach,” he said.

He roughly pried her teeth open with a spoon, opened her mouth and pushed a long tube down her throat. She hiccuped, coughed up blood and then vomit.

“Help me, Claire,” he ordered.

I shook with rage and apprehension. She’s solid as a rock, I said to myself. I was looking at Jean Luze’s unhappy face and felt as if I had climbed to the blazing peaks only to crash to the ground, every bone broken.

An icy wind dried the sweat on my brow. If Annette left him cold, how can I hope to move him? I told myself. He’s strong, and the strong are without pity even toward themselves.

A man shapes his desire according to his woman, and thus loves her only as much as he respects her, I told myself in consolation. So reasoning, I quickly realized then that Annette could never have inspired anything lasting in him.

“Is she better?” he asked Dr. Audier.

“Yes, she will sleep a day or two and then she will wake up.”

The ash from his cigarette fell on Annette’s face and Jean Luze, bending over her, blew it away.

I am watching and waiting for Annette to wake up. I am sitting by her side, arms folded. My eyes don’t leave her. It’s over. Let her live her own life. I failed to reach my goal with her. I am going to play my next card. No third party this time. Unexpected confidence fills me. Slowly I feel it emerge. Is this maturity? I run my hand over my face to feel the first transformations in my features. Yes, I have changed. My moist lips are parted on a tentative decision still unclear to me. I realize my worth. Everything that has fermented in my mind over forty years-my unappeased desires, my unheard pleas, the oblivion of solitary pleasure-is rising up within me. A revolution. I feel ready to answer to the demands of my being.

Jean is anxious again. He’s got two sick women on his hands. He knows full well that he is partly responsible for Annette’s suicide attempt. What’s going on inside him? And what’s going on inside me-I who am fully responsible? For the second time in my life and the first time in the last twenty years, I don’t want to know what’s inside me.

***

Annette opened her eyes two days later. She didn’t cry didn’t say a word. She took the milk on Dr. Audier’s orders and swallowed it with a grimace. Legs shaky she went to the bathroom and then got back in the bed I had remade for her.

“I don’t want anyone else but you in the room, you hear me, Claire? No one else…”

Her mournful stare inspires no remorse in me.

“Not even Jean?”

“Not even him.”

“And Dr. Audier?”

“Well, he is my doctor.”

She too has taken a decision. Maybe we took it together.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she adds with a sort of dignity, “and I took too many sleeping pills… How many days was I unconscious?”

“Two days.”

I stop Jean Luze at her door with malicious glee.

“She doesn’t want to see anyone.”

“Not even me?”

“Not even you.”

He lights a cigarette.

“Naturally, I haven’t told Félicia anything,” he tells me, “and I’m relying on your discretion. Whatever Annette’s reasons, there is no excuse for what she did. She only thinks of herself. She’s only a dirty little egoist, you hear me? The dirtiest little egoist I have ever known.”

An emptiness in me. Graves, ravines, chasms, aren’t deep enough to bury me. I lie beneath the last geological layer, at once dead and alive. No, dead, truly dead. A kind of automaton. I no longer have a soul. Is this what despair is? I can’t fool myself anymore. If I were to throw myself at him, I now know what to expect. He has made up his mind about us.

“Dirty little egoist,” he said. “Cracked-up women”… And we are indeed that, me and Annette, I know.

I’m alone in the dark cradling my doll. Her little artificial body is cold in my hands. Cold, this hair the wind has never tangled, cold, every part of her is cold, like death, like Jean Luze.

There was such wealth in my impoverishment! Back then anything that came from him was bliss. What possessed me to be demanding? Look how I am being punished! I angrily swallow my hopes and my love. There is nothing but hatred in me. Its roots spread, I feel them take hold of every part of my being. In every human being there is a blessed soul made miserable by the pursuit of happiness. All those who pray demand favor from God. But He’s tired of it all and He gets His revenge by botching His work. We are merely the rough drafts Nature cynically employs in its quest for Perfection. Tormented creatures, a frightful mixture of the monstrous and divine, thrown pell-mell into an inhospitable world to wait for death! What choice do we have? But love must protect me from myself. I am afraid of finding myself alone with all this hatred. What would happen to me if I looked it straight in the face, if I gave in to it?…

The heat of desire scalds my soulless body, all the same. A new condition for me, but little by little I will become accustomed to it. I’m burying the sentimental old maid, her dreams of love, her false and overwrought ideas about life: love is nothing but two pieces of flesh rubbing together, I conclude cynically. Is this realist definition trying to retaliate against me? That very night, for the first time I saw another man’s face over me. I felt his hands caressing me and I heard his voice begging me, crying out with love, weeping with despair. I closed my eyes and drew him to me, a naked, big, and black athletic body I did not want to recognize.

Jean Luze is cheerful again. He’s watching Félicia breastfeed his child.

I rummage around their room, under the pretext of tidying up. I open drawers, explore their trunks, out of morbid curiosity. Hatred and jealousy have made me so vigilant that I want to penetrate into their most intimate spaces. In a fury I break the lock on one of Jean Luze’s suitcases while Félicia sleeps. I find the picture of a very young woman with big, sad, dreamy eyes who looks strikingly like Félicia. A relative of his, no doubt. Not a terribly revealing clue. Nothing. Look at me now, spying on their life in earnest.

The stars multiply, separate, and scatter. Everything comes to an end and then starts again. Suddenly, the moon’s cheerful face smiles in the naked sky. No, she’s not in the sky. She promenades between sky and earth. Alone like me. She smiles. She carries out her lunar duties with bliss. She accepts her lot. She is at peace.

I continue to take care of Félicia and the child. I am the one who bathes them, I am the one who prepares their meals. I live in their room more than in mine. Jean Luze comes and goes, uses the bathroom, changes his shirt, paying me no mind. All they talk about is Jean-Claude. They talk about that larva as if it were a human being. When Félicia says “our son,” Jean Luze looks up at her adoringly. Larva or not, for them he exists. And that’s what matters.

Mme Audier also came with a gift for Félicia. She wiggles about like an old monkey under Jean Luze’s impassive gaze.

“All is well now. Jules told me so. Isn’t that wonderful?”

She always feels the need to imply that her husband is a miracle worker.

The way her eyes are darting around, she must suspect something. She can’t contain herself any longer.

“And what about our lovely Annette? I don’t see her anymore.”

“But she’s at work right now,” I answer.

She smiles hypocritically. How has Dr. Audier managed to live with this woman for so long? And what can you expect from such a man? Despite all the respect I have for him, I can see why Jean Luze snubs him. He sets an example of caution, resignation and cowardice for the younger generation. I feel like shouting this at his wife. She is watching for Félicia’s reaction as she speaks. She talks up Annette’s beauty, mentions her flings with an angelic little attitude in contrast with her wrinkled, cunning old devil-eyes.

“She’s just a stylish girl who isn’t made for provincial life. If she didn’t make an effort of some kind, she would mildew with age! She is right to shake off her yoke…”

She laughs but her laugh rings false. One can feel how she is embittered by old age. How she must hate Annette for her youth! With her dwarfish legs, she has always looked like a vile jointed doll. Jean Luze is in the way. As long as he is there, she will hold back her venom. Is she completely tactless, or is she intentionally talking about Annette hoping to see Félicia snap? But she will not get such satisfaction. I know my sister. She will submit to torture before betraying herself. We try to wash our dirty laundry only among family. I will do my part to disappoint Mme Audier and save face. Jean Luze leaves, and she starts in on Jane Bavière.

“She’s a disgrace. She has no shame. There she is now, parading her kid right under the noses of decent folk. What a pity you were not able to attend mass Sunday! Father Paul’s sermon was clearly directed at her…”

If the things happening in this town haven’t changed this old woman, well then we are truly lost.

In any case, I can’t imagine Jane prattling about Mme Audier, watching her every move. She must not even remember that she exists: you attack your neighbor to mask your own envy, but what could Jane envy her for?

Just to shock her, I want to praise Violette, the prostitute, but I dare not. Confident I share her opinions, she calls on me as her witness. The strength of habit! I am unable to loosen my tongue and speak my mind.

Tonight, I hold a mannequin in my arms the size of Jean Luze. A mannequin so perfect it would appease Messalina’s ardor. [16] I close my eyes, offering my naked body. My imagination rages! The hand stroking mine is his. I am taut as a bow. Gasping for air, I whisper his name. My head roils on the pillow. I am no longer seeing him but another. Who is it? I don’t dare comprehend. Despite my efforts, a feeling of frustration lingers. I come with lassitude, with regret and remorse, as if my body disapproved of this duality.

Freedom is an inmost power. That is why society limits it. In the light of day our thoughts would make monsters and madmen of us. Even those with the most limited imagination conceal something horrifying. Our innumerable flaws are proof of our monstrously primitive origin. Rough drafts that we are. And we will remain so as long as we lack the courage to hack a path through the tangled undergrowth of life and walk with eyes fixed on the truth. The hard conclusion to an ephemeral life on the road to perfection. One can’t reach it without sacrifice and suffering. I would like to be sure that Beethoven died satisfied to have written his concertos. Without this certainty, what would be the point of the painful anxiety of a Cézanne searching for a color that escapes him? Or of the anguish of a Dostoyevsky grasping at God in the thoughts swarming within the hellish complexity of the soul! All of them proof of another life, mysterious and intangible, clamoring for its share of immortality. Each of us must find within ourselves the possibility to meet such demands. It is a matter of will and action. Of choosing to be puppets or to be human beings. As for me, I sometimes feel I have gone off course, standing for years in front of a door that would not open for me and that I was afraid to force. Afraid perhaps out of sheer terror of facing the truth. When the time comes to follow my own path, I lose my nerve. Oh, what wouldn’t I give to seize the essential thread of my thought once and for all! Something I can’t define is rising from my innermost being in short-lived flashes. And here I am, my hands open and more empty than ever.

Life continues in its monotonous and petty course. Fortunately, I carry within me a world quite different from the one I live in. I have even broken with Annette. Her mediocre taste repels me. I aspire to find some kind of happiness beyond myself. Now I want our fates to be independent of each other. I don’t like this boy who paws her in the evening on the veranda, this Paul Trudor who’s been after her since the ball.

“She’s about to make a bad match,” Félicia confessed to me warily. “Try and speak to her.”

And why should I be against it, personally? He’s the man she needs. He’ll whittle away until her fire dies down. I hear Annette laughing. Her old waterfall of laughter. It’s over, Jean Luze will never be able to turn her head again. She brushes right past him, undulating in her tight skirt, and blows a mouthful of smoke in his face.

“You know,” she says to him, “I can’t make up my mind about your son; he’s so small that I can’t tell whether he’s handsome or ugly.”

Jean Luze laughs. He shakes Paul Trudor’s hand and watches them as they leave, entwined around each other…

I can’t help it, I like his reactions. Even looking at him through others’ eyes, he does not disappoint me. Or maybe I can’t be objective when it comes to him. I know passion blinds, that one lends people and things whatever color one wishes. That’s how one day I got it into my head to water a pretty plant Annette had brought back from Bob Charivi’s, marveling at how it seemed to revive with cool water. I only realized my idiocy when I heard my sister laughing because the plant was in fact artificial.

“No doubt my eyesight is going,” was the excuse I tried to make.

By what miracle had I seen this plant sparkle at the touch of water? Ideas are powerful, mysteriously so. Doesn’t everything, good and bad, have its own smell? I have always compared people to pure or rancid things, depending on what I associate them with. I have to admit that when it comes to Jean Luze the comparisons are more and more flattering Temperaments made of whole cloth displease me. I don’t like the born killer or the long-suffering saint. There is both violence and gentleness in this man, strength and weakness. Could he, frail and pure as he is, appease this swamp of desires that at times reduces me to a sordid little beast?

***

This morning, Annette announced her plans to marry.

“What?” Félicia cried out, but caught herself quickly. “I congratulate you, Annette,” she added, lowering her eyes.

“Good for you,” Jean Luze said simply.

“Do you like Paul?”

“You’re marrying him, not me, right?”

His tone seemed equivocal, as if he was nursing some rancor. Or is he, like us, simply unhappy about this match?

“Claire,” Annette told me afterward, “get ready to spend a tidy sum. What I want is a really beautiful lace dress. And you, Jean, what will you give me? At the store there is a gold bracelet I like.”

“It’s yours,” he replied simply.

“Find a way to order my trousseau from another town. Even the Syrian stores are going bankrupt here and all you can find is junk,” she added.

“Monsieur Trudor,” Jean Luze suggested enigmatically, “travels often enough to Port-au-Prince. Surely he could do a favor for his future daughter-in-law.”

“Now, that’s a terrific idea,” Annette replied.

Félicia waited for Annette to leave, then looking irate she said to me:

“A black man! A black man in our family. And one of the lowest sort! Can you believe this?”

“My God!” Jean Luze said, stroking her hair indulgently, “there is no need to get worked up about this.”

“It’s not so much the color of his skin that I mind, but his vulgarity and especially his father,” she stammered, a little ashamed of herself.

The wedding preparations have turned the house upside down. Annette comes in from time to time with lingerie that she displays on the dining room table for us admire: bras, nightgowns, slips, nothing is left out. And Jean Luze must give his opinion. He knows about such things, she insists, he’s traveled a great deal.

She opens her arms, buoyant and charming.

“Oh, if only I could go away, far, far away!”

She leans toward Jean Luze.

“Tell us some stories,” she begs him. “What was your life like? What did you used to do? You must have been with so many women…”

He gets up. A little too abruptly.

“I don’t like telling stories,” he said coldly, “and I never had much time to carry on with women…”

He walks away. I look at Félicia. Her eyes follow him with concern.

“He never talks about his past,” she says slowly, “never…”

“Not even to you?” Annette asks.

“Not even to me.”

She gets up.

He has confided in me though. Does he trust me so much that he would honor me with secrets he keeps from his wife? Or is it that he can let himself go with an old maid, telling her snippets of his life from time to time precisely to spare the one he loves, to keep her away from what’s past in order to preserve present love and future joys for her? Too bad! I will still have secrets to share with him, a painful, miserable past that I will help him bear. How I wish I could be sure he has never really confided in Félicia…

The baby is still quite ugly. He snores softly in his crib. Félicia fusses over him like a mother hen. She would hide him under her wings if she had any. Since his arrival she has never trusted me with him. On the other hand, I’m the one who washes the bottles and who keeps track of feedings. I have always had a supporting role in life. I resign myself to it more and more poorly. I will never love this kid. He is so small I have trouble believing he will ever grow up. He’s all phlegm. I have no desire to take him in my arms. His nose is always clogged with mucus and his skin is still peeling.

“My beautiful darling,” his mother whispers to him, “my cutie!”

***

It’s started again. This morning, Calédu bludgeoned several peasants. He’s furious. I watched the whole scene from behind my shutters. Other eyes in the neighborhood were spying too. I saw curtains moved by trembling hands, eyes glowing behind other blinds; I heard whispering to the right, to the left, and piercing the whispering at almost regular intervals, Calédu’s swearing, the peasants’ cries of pain and protest: they went on strike against M. Long to demand a better price for their wood. In response M. Long unloaded an electric saw from the boat docked in the harbor for the past two hours, and the commandant made the peasants haul it themselves. It was taking too much time to chop the trees down with axes, and M. Long was in a hurry to buy all of the mountain wood at the price he had fixed. One of the peasants kept talking despite the blows:

“Don’t give in!” he yelled. “Hang on, and if I die, don’t forget you must stick together.”

He was taken to the prison dying…

I clutch my doll against my chest. Alone in the dark, I gaze at the moon and attempt a smile. Desire is fading. I feel purified. I hear the church clock chime the hour. Another sleepless night washes away and the day rises without pity and lines up behind the other days of my life. My wrinkles deepen and my features wilt. Old age is coming soon. Oh, I want to live, to live before it’s too late! Suddenly, I am starving for tenderness more than ever. My own is being wasted and I would like to give it to someone. I open the window. Dawn rises fragrant with the night sap oozing from the trees. I imagine Jean Luze lying next to Félicia. She sleeps with her back to him. He is alone like me. Alone with his memories and the heavy past he drags after him like a ball and chain. I see him. He is thinking, one hand behind his head, the other twisting a pajama button. I’m wrong, he’s in the living room. His favorite melody reaches me, muted. He is with Beethoven. Why did he flee his bedroom? What comfort does this music bring him? What’s going on inside him? I open my door carefully. He is there in his bathrobe, head in his arms, bent by what pain I don’t know. I gently close my door again and go to the window: another man is walking in the street, his face turned toward my house. A lit cigarette betrays the jerky movements of his hand. Who is this man watching?

This solitary patrol beneath my window reveals either love or hate.

Today Jean Luze’s brow is lined with concern. He smokes endlessly and walks up and down the dining room. We are alone. Félicia is in her room and Annette has not come home yet. I steal a glance at him but can’t bring myself to question him. Meanwhile, he suffers, I know it. He stops in front of me, looks at me for a second and draws a long puff from his cigarette.

“You know what Monsieur Long suggested to me yesterday?” he said. “No, it’s loathsome. He wanted me to doctor the books so that he could prove he paid the peasants three times more for the wood than he had. Naturally, I would get my cut. It’s really a gang and the Syrians are in on it too. I saw proof of this recently…”

He seems beside himself.

“I may be stupid,” he adds, “but I can’t compromise, I refuse to get rich that way. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, I see that now. After all, robbery and exploitation are the rule these days. Monsieur Long chose a foreigner as his accountant. He knows full well why. Because, after all, how is this any of my business, he must tell himself. But he forgets that a man, no matter where he is, takes his ideas and convictions with him. I slaved hard all my life. I’ve never had to get involved in any racket. That’s more than I can bear. By working for Monsieur Long, I feel I’m committing a dishonest act against you. An American friend offered me this position and I accepted it. Simple as that. You think you’ve seen it all and then you see this kind of corruption and realize you don’t know anything about life.”

“Quit, Monsieur Long,” I said to him very simply.

“Do you want me to live here at your expense? Do you think that could be a solution for me? No, the only thing I can imagine is leaving. I’m waiting for my contract to expire before talking to Félicia. She’s so fragile, so emotional!”

He gets up and looks at his watch:

“It’s already six o’clock! Excuse me, Claire, I have to get dressed, and thanks for being a friend to me…”

I didn’t have the strength to throw myself in his arms to confess my love. What he had just said about Félicia held me back. It’s that naïve, childish, delicate side of her that he must love. For him, I’m the eldest, the experienced woman who has made her choice, who didn’t marry in order to remain independent. He would never believe that I have suffered so much from being this way that I now doubt myself. He comes to me like I am a sister, he opens his heart, what more can I ask for? If only he knew that my experiences are merely secondhand, if only he knew that romantic love would make me melt! What would he do then? Can he really think there have been men in my life? Having seen how Annette lives her life, can he even imagine that other women have grown old without ever having had a single affair, traumatized and shriveled? He talks about himself and I keep quiet. All I have ever known how to do is keep quiet.

“Augustine!” I shouted to take my unhappiness out on someone, “what are you waiting for, set the table!”

“I won’t stay in this hole,” Annette blurted out this morning. “I will leave. They want to stop Paul from marrying me. They’re telling him all kinds of stories about me. The biggest cowards among them are sending him anonymous letters. As if they had nothing better to do. But he will marry me, I swear…”

She is reaping the nastiness she has sown. She is forced to deal with others for the first time in her life and is just appalled.

How can I convince her that only the most base people of any social class pay attention to gossip? It would be imprudent and useless.

“They don’t exist for me,” she shrieks. “Why are they meddling in my affairs?”

The young Trudor dines with us that evening. Annette is so ravishing he can hardly eat. She leads him into the living room. Later, after the Luzes retire to their room, I catch him kneeling before her. He is caressing her slowly, deeply, his mouth on her breast. Then he pushes her back and buries his head between her thighs. She moans and finally lets out a little muffled cry almost like she’s in pain. He wants to take her but she pushes him away. She pulls down her skirt impatiently and strokes his hair. He will have her only on their wedding night. She’s not as harebrained as she seems. She knows how to make a man do her bidding.

Jane Bavière made me a blue dress to wear on the day of the baptism. After all, the godmother shouldn’t look too dumpy. The baby is a month old. His limbs are growing, to my surprise. He is not as skinny as before. He bleats and stares at the ceiling with eyes that look like his father’s. I can’t stand to hear him cry. I’m a little obsessed with keeping track of his mealtimes. It’s odd. Could this be love?

Tomorrow is the baptism. The godfather has given me perfume that I hate and flowers that I put in a vase in the living room. Let’s hope he will remember to tie his laces and close his fly.

Félicia is having me arrange an elaborate menu. Really, how inconsiderate! There is only salted fish and cornmeal at the market. And of the lowest quality. The chickens are scrawny and prohibitively priced, vegetables nonexistent. Augustine returns home every market day babbling: “It’s death,” she says, “death!” It’s an expression she likes and she uses to sum up any grim situation. Too bad, we will serve them fish every which way and nothing but fish.

The Trudors, their whole clan, naturally have to be there. I also invited Mme Camuse and Father Paul. This time, Jean Luze did not add M. Long’s name to the guest list and I managed to get Annette to accept that we will exclude Calédu. Whatever happens happens!

At the table we are a fairly disparate group. Mme Camuse is very distinguished in a high-collared black dress. And Father Paul, looking dapper, coughing loudly, a real wine enthusiast and gourmand; Mme Trudor, a black woman as sinewy as her son and as her thin, short, bald husband; Félicia, whose pallor looks green (Jean-Claude has taken to crying at night), and Annette, her long black hair floating on her shoulders, radiant with health; Paul Trudor, silent and gloomy; and Jean Luze, cordial and affable, a man of the world, I must say. Paul’s sister, some kind of idiot clucking like a mother hen, is sitting next to me. She has a devious manner I don’t care for. It seems the Trudors aren’t very good at bringing up their offspring either. Mme Camuse’s demeanor has me on tenterhooks. She’s watching the Trudors too closely. Her eyes turn from the wife to the husband, from the husband to the children; stiff-lipped, she follows their every gesture: M. Trudor scrapes too hard with his spoon and his wife forgets to wipe her lips before drinking. I avoid Mme Camuse’s looks and eat in silence. Dr. Audier, seated next to his wife, is listening to Father Paul’s rather tedious stories about the old days.

“Young Haitians laugh at the past,” Dr. Audier says. “Once upon a time, the past nurtured, gave hope and courage.”

“What do you expect,” Jean Luze answers softly. “All young people have learned to look toward the future and, in the process, they strive to forget the past.”

“Is it that easy?” Father Paul asks him.

“To forget the past? Yes and no. In any case, forgetting is necessary. In a country’s history the example of others, even if they were heroes, can’t help anyone. Contexts change. The struggle becomes different…”

“You are right,” Mme Camuse butts in, more thoughtlessly than ever. “And you seem to speak from experience. However little you know our country, what is happening here must have enlightened you. You’ll be astonished to hear that, not so long ago, we lived opulently…”

“Opulently, really!” Jean Luze exclaims skeptically.

“Oh!” Annette adds suddenly. “Today I saw a beggar swallow a raw fish. It seems he caught it by diving headfirst into the sea.”

“Only some of you lived opulently,” M. Trudor emphasizes, ignoring Annette completely. “You’ll tell me that nothing has changed or that the situation has even gotten worse; all that’s happened is the roles have been reversed. As the Haitian proverb goes: ‘Today it’s the hunter’s turn, tomorrow the prey’s.’ As for the beggars, only the hurricanes are responsible, isn’t that right?”

No one responds. Jean Luze grimaces involuntarily. Mme Camuse fixes an imperceptible smile, tilting her head with a more than aristocratic bent, meant to challenge the vulgarity of the “prey” to which the prefect and his family belong.

“And they were selfless, your heroes,” Father Paul continues vehemently, following his train of thought. “I don’t mean to criticize anyone, but I once knew men worthy of admiration, who put country before coin.”

“Selfless, who isn’t?” Mme Trudor cries. “Bureaucrats are so badly paid that they can boast of serving the Republic for peanuts. Isn’t that so, Julian?”

“You don’t get things done by choosing poverty,” M. Trudor declares again. “You do it with this”-he taps his belt where a weapon is concealed-“and with some of that”-he slowly rubs his fingers together.

“Hmph!” Father Paul grumbles.

Jean Luze tactfully changes the topic of conversation. Turning to Paul, he asks if he enjoys reading.

“Yes, detective novels,” he admits frankly.

“Well, now, that’s very good,” Mme Camuse nods with a mocking smile.

And turning to Jean Luze:

“My dear sir, would it be indiscreet to ask you how you like it here?”

“My work keeps me here, Madame,” he replied coldly.

“You see, I was just going to say,” she adds with some uncertainty. “Choosing this Haitian province wasn’t the right thing for a man like you. How did you end up here, I wonder?”

“I go where work calls me, Madame. Unfortunately, I don’t have an estate.”

“Bah!” Mme Camuse says softly with her usual eloquent little toss of the head, “but nevertheless you’ve managed to find happiness here.”

“Yes,” Jean Luze answers, again without looking at Félicia, “that’s true.”

“The Europeans adore us. I’ve heard that back in colonial times, Frenchmen deserted their wives for the beautiful mulatto girls,” Mme Camuse recounts. “I, for one, am a direct descendant of noble French colonials of the name de Camuse. But what can you expect, time has rubbed away the full name as it rubs away everything else. All you can do is adapt to the new and minimize the damage. Hmm!…”

We were having coffee now. Father Paul, all red from too much food and drink, stroked his belly with a satisfied expression on his face and went so far as to accept a glass of anisette, declaring:

“We better ‘push’ that coffee, Monsieur Luze, we better.”

This loosened up the guests, who were tense because of his overly frank remarks, the prefect’s awkward rebuttal and Mme Camuse’s tactlessness.

We moved to the living room. Félicia decided to comment on the fact that Vera had not said a word during the meal and seemed rather shy.

“Our little girl? Well, she’s only fourteen,” Mme Trudor answered. “Who isn’t shy at that age?”

“One can be shy at any age,” Annette answered. “Take Claire, for example.”

“Don’t confuse shyness and reserve,” Jean Luze quickly added. “Claire is not talkative, that’s all.”

“Indeed, Claire has never liked to talk a lot,” Father Paul agreed.

Mme Camuse’s eyes went from Jean Luze to me.

“Her reserve may be the result of too strict an education,” she said. “I knew Monsieur and Madame Clamont, they were rather stern. Weren’t they, Claire?”

“Yes, indeed…”

“And there is something else,” Dr. Audier slipped in. “Psychological complexes, for example.”

“Complexes!” Jean Luze exclaimed.

“Can you imagine, my friend: for a long time Claire had a complex about not being her sisters’ equal, about not being as white and pink as a lily.”

I quicked turned in the direction of the Trudors. Fortunately, they were at the other end of the living room. I gave Dr. Audier a reproachful look and caught one Jean Luze was giving me. It was so strange and unsettling that I lost my composure and spilled anisette on my skirt.

“You dope!” he hissed at me later when we found ourselves alone. “You big dope, back then you must have been the most beautiful of the three Clamont sisters!”

Oh God, now look at him, just like Mme Camuse, talking about me in the past tense.

How mysterious a human being can seem to the very eyes spying on him. Even the secrets he tells you are at best partial revelations. How can you really know what’s going on inside Jean Luze?

Very reluctantly he agreed to give Annette away at the altar. On the other hand, he was quick to give her that gold bracelet she lusted for and he got two kisses on the cheeks for it. The house bubbles with effervescence. She is getting married tomorrow and the gifts keep flowing. The lace gown, courtesy of M. Trudor, which cost me an arm and a leg, is spread on an armchair in the living room, as is the veil adorned with orange blossoms.

“You’ve put on weight since the baby,” Annette says to Félicia. “You have to try to eat less.”

Jean Luze involuntarily looks at his wife. Does he realize the extent to which she’s lost her looks? Another washed-out white woman like all the others he has known. Annette looks at Félicia sternly, shakes her head, looks Jean Luze straight in the eye, and then walks off with an irresistible and provocative syncopation of her hips. Now there’s a Haitian girl who could tempt a saint. Despite her light golden skin, nothing about her could make anyone confuse her with a white woman.

The next day I strapped Félicia into a corset, which didn’t make her any thinner. We left the baby with Augustine and went to the church.

A pressed and powdered crowd jostled inside. Not exactly the “cream of society” as Mme Camuse would point out, elegant and old-fashioned in her long black dress and the feathered hat she wears only for special occasions. Annette glittered on Jean Luze’s arm. Two maids of honor dressed in pink walked before them. Then came the groom on Félicia’s arm, M. and Mme Trudor, Dr. Audier and his wife, Eugénie with her pharmacist, who was dragging his partially paralyzed leg, the mayor dressed like the prefect in his eternal gray suit and black hat, and others from Port-au-Prince whom we did not know, friends of the Trudors. On my way to church I noticed Jane Bavière standing by her door with her son, and Dora peering through her blinds. The sight of them unnerved me. I had not dared invite either of them, thereby acquiescing to the rules of good society and the established order.

The crush of people at church had prevented me from staring at Jean Luze to my heart’s content. I noticed only his distant and chagrined expression as he walked Annette to the altar. He seemed so miserable that I thought he was jealous.

“Look how furious Jean looks,” Félicia whispered to me. “I had to scold him to make him do this. It bothers him to put himself on display.”

Was she as sure of herself as she seemed?

Back home, as the guests gathered in the living room, champagne flutes in hand, the commandant arrived. He greeted only Annette and Paul Trudor and remained standing, his back to the wall. Our eyes locked. He slowly walked up to me and hissed:

“So our hatred is mutual,” he said to me.

But his expression seemed to belie his words.

I started to tremble while my eyes clung to his lips, his teeth, his hands. I saw him smile, so I turned my back to him abruptly.

Again I found myself across from M. Trudor, who was about to speak, surrounded by guests straining their necks to get a good look at the newlyweds.

If the speech was dismal, fortunately there were too few of us to notice.

Jean Luze made me his partner in crime, winking at me with an amused smile, as if I were colluding with him in witnessing this disaster.

Another sleepless night, thanks to Calédu. I’m angry with myself for having trembled before him. I have no other choice but to curb my hatred if I want to decipher the frightful expression on his face. It took some doing, but I managed to chase him from my thoughts.

How empty the house feels without Annette! You might think you were in a funeral parlor. No more dance music, no more peals of laughter, no more stormy exits. We eat lunch in silence, Jean Luze, Félicia and I. I do the laundry as before, wash Jean-Claude’s bottles and look after Félicia. Am I regaining confidence in myself? To what should I attribute this sudden joie de vivre that has me flinging open the window, drawing deep breaths of the cool morning air into my diaphragm, then closing my eyes and throwing myself across my bed with arms splayed like a cross? So luxurious to lose oneself in a dream-world where one lives only for oneself! Floodgates opened, barriers collapsed, shackles broken, I am now joyfully bounding toward freedom. Just me, face to face with myself, with no one around. Will I die without knowing the firm embrace of a man? There comes a time when virginity seems indecent. Has my upbringing so marked me that it seems out of the question to satisfy my needs in an irregular way?

Annette showed up with Paul eight days after the wedding. We were having lunch. She came in running and kissed us with exclamations of gaiety and joy.

“Félicia, my poor dear! You don’t look so good.”

This is turning into persecution.

Without waiting for Félicia to respond, she rushes to the crib and returns with Jean-Claude, whom she simply woke up.

“Look, Paul darling, he’s so adorable!”

She devoured his cheeks with kisses before finally putting him back on his mother’s lap.

A mad dash to the pantry where she likewise kisses a grumpy Augustine, another mad dash into the living room where a swinging tune soon fills the air. The house is alive again!

“Has anyone here missed me at least?”

She sighs without giving us time to answer:

“Unfortunately, we have to go,” she adds, “some friends are expecting us. Did you see my tan? I live on the beach. Fortunately, this awful old-fashioned paleness is going away…”

She’s gone now. She waves one more time from the car. Her smile cuts dimples in her golden cheeks.

“It’s death here without Mademoiselle Annette,” Augustine suddenly blurts out.

She has dared to say what perhaps all of us were thinking, for habit indeed creates ties and even the most shallow human being leaves behind a void.

Irreproachable as he is toward his wife, the feeling he has for her, is that love? He lacks the spark, the joy the lightheartedness that love brings. Am I fooling myself? I still love him-that is, if love means melting with pleasure at the slightest movement of his hand, if it is unreserved admiration, or sharing common tastes in secret but not daring to give oneself away by speaking of them. How much longer will I be prey to this sterile passion? Am I going to settle for mind games for the rest of my life? I complicate things and, like a masochist, invent a thousand ways to torture myself. Idiot that I am, I did nothing with my youth, when naïveté lends self-confidence. I know too much now to lie to myself without revulsion. I know, for example, that only suffering would lead him to me. How love can make one cruel and sadistic! Am I not just like these torturers? I have suffered too much. It’s time for a truce. I will find it in a different way of life. Platonic love is a myth. Only freaks can settle for that. My love is full-bodied: it’s a nice mixture of sexual drive and lofty sentiment. Just what is necessary not to frighten the respectable woman I am.

I throw myself on my bed and wrap my arms around Jean Luze. I feel the weight of his body on mine. My dry lips always return me to my solitude. Alas, I am alone, alone. More and more I have come to hate these meager compensations, these proofs of my cowardice. Why aren’t you alone, too, Jean Luze? Why aren’t you free? I banish Félicia from my mind. Now I am really turning into a criminal! I am terrorizing myself. A long scream startles me. Someone is calling for help in the dark. I run to the window. I hear the clatter of weapons and a woman cry out. I imagine my neighbors, ears pricked up, trembling and listening like me, just as I imagine the woman in handcuffs being led away by Calédu. I press myself against the wall and open the window a crack. I can’t hear or see anything anymore. Everything has fallen into a kind of deathly silence. I’m surprised at the trembling of my hands and at my heaving rage. What does this have to do with me? And yet, I had the definite impression that, for a minute, I was prey to a dangerous and unbidden thought, one that I shook off willingly. The thought crosses my mind again in a flash. A flash of lightning flying like a dagger from my head, shining before my eyes like a sign. I hide my face in my hands and try to banish this terrible vision by sinking voluptuously into memories of the past.

Can that be me, the little girl hopping on one foot in the stairwell, with beaming eyes and joy in her heart? How old am I? Six, seven years old. All of that is so far away now. My first memories go back to those days. Before that I don’t exist. Suffering is the revelation that makes you aware of yourself. There must be some extraordinary significance to that age because that was when my parents became strict and suspicious toward me. I was reprimanded for no reason, spitefully watched. My mother put sewing work in my hands, and I spent most of my time sitting on a low chair at her feet. Every day my father called for me in a gruff voice to make me repeat my lessons, and pinched my ear hard enough to draw blood for the smallest error. “It clears the mind,” he would say to reassure me about his meanness.

To toughen me and perhaps to punish me for his disappointed paternal hopes, he decided to raise me as if I were a boy. Every morning, he would ask for his horse and put me in the saddle. I screamed the first time, frightening the stable hand Demosthenes, an old black man who was enslaved by his meager wages and who trembled before my father. I fell the second time. Demosthenes picked me up, and my father told him:

“Put her back on the horse.”

Crying, I clung to his neck.

“Put her back in the saddle,” my father screamed.

The poor man had to obey.

I fell again and Demosthenes grabbed me in his arms and ran to the house.

“Madame,” he said to my mother. “He’s going to kill your little girl.”

My father came to get me. He struck Demosthenes, angrily tore me from my mother’s arms and stood me in front of the animal.

“He’s not going to do anything to you,” he said, “look!”

He put my frozen hand on the horse’s muzzle, sat me back in the saddle and whipped his rump.

I screamed in terror, and then stiffened my legs and thighs around the horse’s warm belly. A month later, he galloped with me beneath the trees in the courtyard.

While waiting to be dispatched to France, I spent my time with other daughters from bourgeois families at the École Nationale of the French sisters, whose mother superior was a friend of my mother’s. This meant I was watched closely. At home, it fell to my father to make me do my work. Every day I was punished for the blots in my notebook. The punishment consisted of kneeling with arms crossed, chin up, next to my father. Eyes closed, trembling with fatigue, I would wait for the “get up” that signaled an end to my torment. Sometimes I would cry, and then the punishment lasted much longer.

Twice a week, from my room I heard my father yell orders to the servants and gallop away to Lion Mountain, which is what they called the six hundred acres planted with coffee, from which he extracted our prosperity. My father, very proud of his coffee, bragged about having studied agronomy in France and, unlike the other planters, personally watched over his field hands.

When I turned ten he gave me my own horse, which I promptly named Bon Ami, perhaps foreseeing the moral solitude that awaited me.

People tended to keep to themselves. When we did have guests, and this was rare, our living room would open to the Granduprés, Bavières, Soubirans, Duclans, Camuses, Audiers, M. Prélat, a French merchant set up on Grand-rue, French ship captains and crew, and all the best society from Port-au-Prince, always received in the French style with plenty of wine and champagne. Our port was opened to Europe and the United States, and Grand-rue overflowed with French, German, English and American products. The Syrians, recently naturalized as Haitians in order to benefit legally from all of our privileges, were also supplied by these boats.

In the year 1912, I was barely twelve when I became friends with Térésa Aboud, a very sweet Syrian girl with long black hair who spoke nothing but Creole. I only saw her at school, and even then only while concealing it from the mother superior. One day she came and told us that the Syrians were being driven out of the country by the president of Haiti and that they, the Abouds, would starve to death in Kingston, where they planned on taking refuge. My friends and I found such a measure truly unfair and took Térésa under our protection.

“Papa,” I asked my father at the dinner table, “why does President Leconte [17] want to drive the Syrians out of our town?”

“Because they are getting rich at our expense,” my father replied. “What’s more, they spend little, hoard money, and are seeking protection under the wings of foreign powers whose citizens they now claim to be. Because of their disloyalty, the competition has become unfair and the poor Haitians are being driven to bankruptcy.”

“We waited too long to drive them out,” my mother interjected with rancor. “The competition ruined my parents.”

“Is that true, Mama?”

“It’s true, my child.”

Back in school, I avoided talking to Térésa and also refused the candy she offered me every day.

“Why?” she asked me.

“You have ruined my mother’s parents,” I answered harshly, “so go back to your own country.”

One evening, I saw my father come home all worked up, announcing that British warships had weighed anchor in Port-au-Prince harbor to protect their Syrian subjects. Dora Soubiran, Eugénie Duclan, Jane Bavière, Agnès Grandupré and I trapped Térésa at the gate and beat her up.

The next day, my father received Dr. Audier and my friends’ fathers. They seemed really worked up, and the cocktails prepared by my mother, who tiptoed in and out like a shadow, stoked their vigor and agitation.

“The foreigner has invaded our country,” my father barked. “Our businesses are now in the hands of the French, the Germans, the British and the Americans. The Syrians are mere surrogates. All of this is simply competition between the great powers. Who is it that’s arming the people and teaching them to say: ‘Down with the Syrians’?”

“The French,” Dr. Audier replied.

“And who is openly protesting the expulsion of the Syrians?”

“The Americans and the British,” Dr. Audier answered again, looking to the others as witnesses.

“The United States is afraid to be supplanted by the Europeans in imports,” my father added. “It’s a cold war between Europe and the United States. What are we in all of this? Lost lambs devoured by wolves. Only one man has been able to meet the challenge and drive out these Syrian undesirables, and this man is none other than our beloved leader. Long live President Leconte!”

“Long live Leconte,” they roared, raising their glasses.

“The people will suffer from unemployment,” my father continued. “They will be prey to poverty in a country without industry. These great powers call us incompetent: they insinuate themselves into our affairs, demand control of our customhouses and, like jackals, fight over our very hides. I am a patriot, a nationalist, and I will defend what I believe to be the national interest until my dying breath…”

“Long live Deputy Clamont!” a short, chubby man named Laurent cried out.

“Long live our deputy!” the others echoed.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” my father answered quietly, as if he were not privately enjoying these outbursts of enthusiasm. “My hour has not yet struck but I am sure it will. For now, I will continue to give my full support to our leader and to watch the opposition closely. I am returning to Port-au-Prince on the next ferry. In my absence, anyone who betrays him must be denounced to the police and punished without mercy…”

My mother found me hiding under the table, my eyes fixed on my father.

The next day, at dawn, the clarion call of the district commandant got us out of bed. We rushed to the balcony. He was resplendent in his uniform with its huge epaulettes and his bicorne hat. He was reading out a statement, surrounded by a police force of “little soldiers,” [18] whose shoulder sashes emblazoned with the word Police were the only thing that distinguished them from beggars.

“Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” he began…

And we learned that the Syrian businesses had just been notified of the order of liquidation.

I wasn’t there to witness the departure of Térésa Aboud because I was in bed with measles. My friends had been forbidden to come near my house for fear of contagion. When a week later I was able to leave my room, from the veranda I noticed the sealed doors of the Syrian shops, and Dora told me that a fanatic had struck Térésa’s mother with a stone as she stepped aboard the American ship.

A little later, our simmering little city learned that the Palais National had been bombed and that more than three hundred soldiers had perished with President Leconte. Reports accumulated and spread far and wide. Day and night, men were scuttling in the streets at all hours or gathering at the Cercle to discuss politics more freely. Who gave my father such an absurd idea? I never found out. But soon he launched his electoral campaign and began preparing his speeches.

Tonton Mathurin, who lived alone in a large beautiful house like ours, was for a time tolerated by decent society in our little city. When he was suddenly accused of consorting with riffraff and of luring local young maids to his home for unsavory purposes, he was quite simply quarantined. My parents threatened to lock me up if I ever spoke to him.

“He lives in sin,” my mother explained to me, “and sin is contagious.”

Despite my precautions, once in a while I caught a glimpse of the man sitting in a wicker chair hidden behind a bush a few paces away from his gate. Once, coming home from school, I found myself face-to-face with him and stood there mesmerized, staring at his enormous eyebrows and his good-natured black face, his wide innocent mouth grinning ear to ear. I spit at his feet and made a sign of the cross.

“Heh heh!” he said. “Do you think I’m Satan in the flesh?”

I fled when I heard him say that, and the next day sought comfort in confession with Father Paul for the vile sin I had committed. In return, each time Tonton saw me he’d thumb his nose at me or show me his fist.

The Grandupré house was next to his. Poor Agnès reminded me of Sophie Fichini, [19] gaunt and weepy-eyed, shrieking every day under the blows she received. She too was pilloried. One day, my mother said:

“You are not to play with Agnès Grandupré anymore, neither in school nor at her house. You’ve got that? She’s a nasty little girl who goes to old Mathurin’s house behind her parents’ back.”

Agnès’s vice intrigued me. I thought about it so intensely that I began to spy on her from my house. One day, I saw her weeping on her veranda after a thrashing. I called her over. She showed me her legs and arms covered with scratches and, turning a distraught eye toward her house:

“They’ve beaten me again, Claire,” she said to me. “They won’t let me see Tonton Mathurin, but he’s the only one who’s good to me.”

“What does he do to you? What does he say to you?”

“He strokes my hair and tells me about Suzette, the daughter he lost. I look like her.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes, I swear.”

I heard my mother scream. My father rushed up and when he saw us together turned pale with anger.

“Come here, Claire.”

Agnès leaped to the street and ran home.

“Come here,” my father repeated.

And when I was before him:

“Who gave you permission to play with the little Grandupré girl?” he yelled, smacking my back with such force that it knocked the wind out of me. “Who? How many times have you seen her? What did she tell you? What have you done together?”

Each question was reinforced with a terrible blow from his belt. At the third lash, I started screaming as loud as Agnès; at the twentieth, I passed out. The next day, I had such a high fever that my mother sent for Dr. Audier.

“I must say! I must say!” he said, shaking his big head, as I saw him staring at my father reproachfully under his glasses.

“What do you expect, my friend, I am instilling values and I mean for them to be respected,” he said to him. “Ours is a race lacking discipline and our old slave blood requires the lash, as my late father used to say.”

“Is that the slaveholder I hear in you?” the doctor gently asked him.

“Maybe! We mulattoes have a little of everything in us, as you know. Tell me, if you hadn’t known me for so long, would you have believed that I have black blood in my veins? This means that my own black blood has been reabsorbed and that I inherited certain traits that will blemish her unless I correct her.”

At that moment, I noticed the milky whiteness of his skin, hardly more tanned than my mother’s. I stared with astonishment at my dark arms resting on the sheets. Was I really their daughter? No, it did not seem possible. How could I be the daughter of two whites? My mother wept quietly and I saw Dr. Audier give her arm a gentle squeeze before leaving.

We lived surrounded by servants my father worked with an iron rod. Some were hired like that young boy a scapegoat my father took in after his parents’ death and brought home one evening from Lion Mountain. He turned out to be insubordinate and insolent.

“Black, you’re black like me,” he once said to me, pulling my hair, “and when I am bigger I will marry you.”

I repeated those words to my father, who beat him so badly he ran away. We never saw him again. He was replaced with Augustine, whose parents themselves brought her to us from Lion Mountain, and from the abuse we heaped upon her, I learned to give thanks for my social position and to appreciate my father despite the beatings he continued to visit upon me. We were about the same age, Augustine and I, and I would have loved to share my games with her, but my mother flatly refused to permit this.

“She’s just a servant,” she said, “a black girl from the hills we don’t even pay! Your father would be furious if you played with her. Invite Jane, Dora and Eugénie, and leave that girl to her work.”

Dodging my parents’ surveillance, I sometimes went to meet an old stable hand, a jack-of-all-trades they called a “groom” in Parisian fashion. He slept on a mat in the stable near the horses. I took out the sugar cubes I had stolen for him.

“Thank you, Miss Claire,” he would say. “A good person, you are.”

Then I went to hug Bon Ami, who would wrinkle his nose to eat the sugar out of my hand.

Félicia was four years old at the time. My mother, who didn’t trust the servants, forced me to help look after her. I had no time to myself. After learning my lessons and doing my chores I had to look after my sister without a break. I took revenge on the sly by leaving her to her own devices as much as possible. Once I let her take a tumble down the stairs on purpose and this got me another thrashing. Yet another comment by Augustine about the color difference between my sister and me prevented me from loving her, and gradually I began to envy her.

The day I turned thirteen, my father ordered Demosthenes to saddle our horses and we galloped to his plantation. I was in a riding habit he had ordered from France, and he was in riding breeches, pith helmet on his head. In my long skirt, frilly white blouse, goose-feather hat, I had the pretentious air of a snob aristocrat of the eighteenth century. I had begged them to take out the feather, pointing out my youth and the embarrassment I would feel exhibiting myself in such a getup.

“Allow me to introduce you to the finer things,” my father said angrily. “You will soon know why.”

The coffee was in bloom. Thinking back, I can still smell the bitter-sweetness of the coffee cherries wet with dew, of mango and quenepa branches like open parasols over the fields; the smell of birds frolicking in the leaves, flying low enough to brush past us; the smell of fresh resin warming in the sun along the coarse trunks of oak and logwood trees. Caw, caw, the seahawks screamed, as the peasants chased them away waving their arms and shouting. I hadn’t seen the farmhands for some time and they were amazed to see a young woman before them. They shook my hand limply in the peasant manner, and one of them scratched his head and said:

“By God, that’s one beautiful black girl you got there, Agronomist.”

My father’s laughter seemed forced. He replied in a pretentious Creole:

“Our race has surprises in store for us yet, Louisor; no one here can predict what type of child will come from his mother’s womb.”

“Except for the real blacks, Agronomist,” retorted Alcius, the oldest of the farmers. “They know they can’t be fooled. A black man and a black woman will give you naught but little black babies. And that’s the truth.”

My father changed the subject, crushed a coffee cherry between his fingers and breathed it in:

“My coffee is the best in the region,” he exclaimed with satisfaction. “Listen, farmers, I know what’s happening on the other plantations: it’s a mess out there. The big planters are abandoning their coffee to dishonest people who steal from them. You know I trust you, but twice a week during harvest I come to check on your work. You can see the result…”

He gestured at the immense verdant expanse, where cherries gleamed between the leaves like rubies.

“Even if I should disappear,” he continued, “you must faithfully keep your commitments. God declined to give me a son, but my eldest daughter will see to the proper upkeep of my business. Such is my will.”

The peasants turned to me and stared with curiosity.

Were they reassured that this very young girl, inoffensive and incapable, would replace my father in the event of his death? They fixed their amused and scornful eyes on me, and I bravely returned their stares.

“But,” my father added, thumping his chest in a highly theatrical gesture, “I am solid as a rock and I will die when I’m a hundred. I am the lion who watches over this mountain, and even when I sit in the president’s chair, I will still make sure everything is in good working order here.”

“God is good,” Alcius responded calmly.

He gestured to his daughter-in-law, and she ran to the hut and returned with coffee steaming on a tray.

“Sit down, Mademoiselle,” she said to me, pointing to a wicker chair.

“So, will you be chief of state soon, Agronomist?” Alcius asked my father.

“God willing.”

“Agronomist,” said Louisor, Alcius’s son, walking toward my father and standing before him, arms crossed, locking eyes. “We have been working for you for a number of years now, but what you pay us isn’t enough to feed our children.”

“Louisor!” Alcius exclaimed.

And his fearful look was fixed farther away, at a hut whose door was closed.

“Look elsewhere, black man,” my father answered Louisor simply, “and if you find better, you have my permission to leave.”

“I built my hut on this land,” Louisor replied. “Might as well stay.”

My father quickly gestured to Alcius and they walked to the hut with the closed door and knocked three times. An old man with a white beard came out, gave my father a military salute and made him come in, putting a familiar hand on his shoulder. Louisor’s wife squatted at my feet, knees at her chin, skirt gathered between her thighs. Her six children were playing under the mango tree, screaming and chasing each other. The oldest child, who looked about ten, was gathering palm seeds to grind and eat. They were dressed in short red jerseys that came to their navels. Even the oldest was not dressed more decently, and I tried hard not to look at what I called his immodest outfit. The youngest began to sulk and ask for bread. The wife gazed at me silently. Her long face stared at my own, and I could find nothing in it but a kind of stupid astonishment. As the child cried harder, I told her to make him be quiet.

“Quiet, quiet,” she screamed at him, “enough.”

“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.

“He’s hungry.”

“Let him eat.”

“It’s not mango season yet,” she said. “There’s nothing in the house; he’ll have to wait until tonight.”

“Why?”

“That’s when Louisor will come back with the money he gets from selling the two bundles of herbs he takes to town.”

“What do you do with the money my father pays you?”

“Money!”

That was all she said, and rising, she took the child and forced his thumb in his mouth.

“Suck, suck,” she said gently, “suck.”

The woman’s young face seemed hewn from stone. I got the feeling that neither joy nor pain could affect it. I was bombarded by a thousand thoughts I was unable to sort out at that moment. My father appeared at the door of the hut with Alcius and the old man. His neck was adorned with multicolored necklaces and his head was bound in a red kerchief. My heart skipped a beat. He called me, and addressing the old man:

“There she is, Papa Cousineau,” he said.

The old man contemplated me for a full minute without saying a word, and then held out his hand to me:

“She looks you straight in the eye, Agronomist,” he said, addressing my father. “That’s a sign that she has a strong head.”

“I raised her like a man,” my father answered, “and now she is old enough to keep my promises.”

“Since you are alive, keep your own promises to the loas. Lion Mountain will not survive if you abandon it. Your daughter will only succeed you upon your death, only upon your death,” the old man firmly stated.

“Then she will have white hair.” My father burst out laughing and thumped his chest. “The lion is still strong, Papa Cousineau, solid as a rock. But don’t forget I am often absent. I will be campaigning soon and my chances of becoming president are good. I have given up on sending her to France, I have taught her to ride horses, I have taught her math only so that she can manage the land. She too must serve the loas”

I looked him straight in the eye.

“I only have one religion, Papa,” I slowly articulated, “and I will never serve the loas”

“Then you will lose Lion Mountain.”

“Don’t rush her, Agronomist,” the old man cautioned. “The Catholic priests and nuns have stuffed her head and talked of voodoo as if it were damnation. Give her time to grow up and she will come to it on her own like every good black woman.”

“I will never serve the loas” I repeated.

And I ran to my horse, which I mounted full of rage.

Under my whip, Bon Ami galloped down the trails, nostrils quivering. I soon heard the hoofbeats of my father’s horse, reined in but champing at the bit. Guava branches stuck to my skirt, smacking me in the face and snatching my riding hat as their trophy. I arrived a few minutes before he did at the entrance to town. It was a Sunday. I found my mother at home all dressed up and, noticing me, she asked where my father was.

“He’s coming,” I answered.

“You barely have time to change and accompany me to vespers,” she told me.

Augustine, her head bristling with nappy little braids, was following Félicia like a dog.

I listened, panting, for my father’s steps. He opened the door, walked up to me and slapped me so hard that I almost fell to the ground.

“What has she done?” my mother asked him.

“Stubborn as a mule! Stubborn as a mule!” my father yelled. “You will obey me, you hear, and I will break you, even if I have to do it with a whip.”

My mother lowered her head and sniffled. I went up to change and accompany her to vespers.

“What have you done to your father this time?” she asked me on the way to church.

“He does voodoo, Mama. I saw him at Papa Cousineau’s, dressed like a disciple.”

“Alas!” my mother answered, “he was rash enough to accept the legacy of his black grandmother and he’s afraid not to keep his promises.”

“I won’t keep them for him,” I screamed with tears in my eyes.

Hush!” my mother said, rolling frightened eyes. “God forbid someone hears you and makes a scandal.”

I didn’t sleep that night. I was so agitated with shock and distaste that I was feverish. Voodoo, which until now I had considered a shameful religion practiced only by the poor, suddenly took shape before my eyes and engaged me in a struggle I had very little chance of winning: I feared my father and dreaded standing up to him.

“Resist, my child,” advised Father Paul, in whom I had confided out of sheer desperation. “Resist with all your might. In such a case as this, disobedience is permitted.”

I resisted and was whipped for it. Time went by. My father was not elected. He reproached me for bringing him bad luck and swore he would break me.

“I made a promise, you understand, I promised that you as the eldest would continue the legacy. But that was before your birth. How could I predict you would be a girl?…”

Although my studies were rather intense, up to now I had read only ancient history and the fables of La Fontaine. My father declared all books unwholesome and my mother, on his orders, cleaned my room herself in order to better rummage through my things at her leisure. My girlfriends’ fates were no happier; I resigned myself to mine, awaiting the marriage that would set me free. As I got older, I put together a life for myself. A very full and secret life to which no one else had access. Not even my friends. Solitude and idleness were my accomplices. To protect myself from prying eyes, I learned the importance of hypocrisy. With my parents I played the part of a perfect young lady. Once their backs were turned, I would undergo a revolution. Quickly changing my attitude, I arched my waist before my mirror, posing languidly, waltzing around and humming in a low voice.

Around that time I saw Frantz Camuse again. He was returning from France, where he had been studying for several years. Our mothers had been friends and were seeing each other again for the first time in six years. He would visit us on Sundays with his mother, who would stroke my hair and who kept saying that I was the prettiest girl she had ever seen. She repeated this so often that I began to doubt her sincerity. My parents welcomed them warmly and went through a great deal of trouble to host them. Frantz was handsome and I began to think about him. I whispered his name in bed at night, my heart full of a delicious feeling, but I remained petrified in his presence.

“The Camuse boy seems interested in our daughter,” my father said one evening to my mother. “Let’s give her a good dowry to encourage him. I am not able to get anything out of this stubborn mule, might as well marry her off. The Camuses are nearly ruined, they will be happy to dust off their coat of arms for us.”

“They think they’ve sprung from the loins of Jupiter,” was my mother’s response.

“I have money enough to make them stuff their prejudices, and after all, I haven’t given up my candidacy.”

“Henri!” my mother implored with a look of despair.

“This marriage will happen,” my father continued. “My money will help them forget certain things.”

“Alas,” my mother sighed, stealing a worried glance at me.

Félicia innocently took my hand.

“Why is Claire black, Mama?” she asked.

“But she is not black,” my mother answered, lowering her eyes.

I abruptly pulled my hand away.

“The sun burned her a little,” my mother added. “It’s a pretty brown.”

“No, she’s black and we’re white.”

“Enough, Félicia,” my father yelled.

Félicia cried and my mother took her in her arms as I ran up to my room. I spent a long time alone there looking at myself in the mirror of my dressing table.

“Why? Why? Why?” I sobbed while banging my fists on the mirror.

And I began to loathe the forebear whose black blood had slyly flowed into my veins after so many generations.

The days that followed were torture. Long family discussions that included Mme Bavière and Mme Soubiran had given me such a complex that I no longer dared look into the blond pink face of Frantz Camuse. I obeyed my mother and wore the new dresses she had made me try on while raving about their “flattering” color. I played the Chopin waltzes that my piano teacher Mlle Verduré had taught me, served drinks and cake to our friends, but my heart was heavy. “Never will he love me, never,” I kept saying to myself. I could see Dora and Eugénie circling around Frantz, clucking like turkeys. I felt the weight of his gaze upon me. But I was too young to realize the sincere interest I had aroused in him.

One evening, he came around without his mother and asked me to walk him to the gate.

“I am leaving for Port-au-Prince next week,” he said. “I would like to write to you.”

“No, don’t ever write to me,” I answered.

“Why?”

I began trembling so badly that he looked at me with astonishment. He grabbed my hand and I jumped as if he had stung me. The contrast between our joined hands had overwhelmed me. I shoved him so hard that he exclaimed:

“Do I disgust you that much?”

“Don’t mock me,” I shouted. “I’m warning you, don’t mock me.”

I made a run for my room and watched him from behind my window blinds. Tears of rage and bitterness ran down my cheeks, and when my mother came into my room, I cried out:

“Why am I black? Why?”

“Your father will make a rich heiress of you.”

“I don’t want anyone to marry me for my money. I will never get married, never.”

“Claire!”

The next day, my father left for Port-au-Prince, accompanied by Laurent. I had seen my mother hand him a bag of money and I heard her cry and reproach him for wasting everything we had to satisfy his vain political passions.

“You are ruining your children, Henri,” she was saying. “You have already sold almost two hundred acres. You have to stop.”

“Let me try my luck one last time,” my father answered. “Over a thousand men are with me. The best families in Port-au-Prince have called for me, all I need to do is to earn the people’s trust and I will win it with this…” (He pointed to the bag of money.) “I will be gone for some time. Have Demosthenes go to the fields with Claire. Let them make sure we aren’t being duped by the peasants. Adieu, my wife. Perhaps you will soon be the First Lady.”

Demosthenes went to Lion Mountain by himself because I refused to go.

“Think how angry your father will be, Claire,” my mother repeated to me. “Think how angry.”

But I stood my ground.

Well before my father’s return, we learned that Tancrède Auguste [20] had been elected. Father returned from the capital looking old, demoralized and nearly ruined. He was welcomed by his diehard supporters, who ranted against the new president, whom they called incompetent.

In less than two years, the country saw four other heads of state come and go well before their terms were up, due to the unremitting anarchy, poverty, killings, and the constant uprisings by the Cacos [21] of the North. The insurrections completely drained state funds. The political climate in our province as well suggested that the country was rolling through one disaster after another on its way into an abyss. The government of Vilbrun Guillaume Sam [22] was cornered and appealed to the Americans for financial assistance. That day I saw my father’s faction give in to their anger, roaming the streets, drawing crowds. They seemed to have gone mad.

“Incompetent!” my father yelled. “All of them, incompetent! They are leading us straight to our ruin. You will soon see Americans in charge of all our institutions. They are waiting for the right moment to jump at our throats. They want to run our financial affairs. They will get control of customs. They’ll throw a noose around our necks. If we keep fighting and spilling our blood in fratricidal struggles, we’ll see an army of American soldiers land on our soil. Haitians don’t know what they need. The only man who can save them from this disaster, they will never choose him, they will never put him in power.”

“Long live Clamont!” the crowd cried out. “Long live Henri Clamont!” He was carried off in triumph this time, and my mother, despite her tears, had to give him another bag of money, which he distributed to a group of strangers who were asking for an audience and who called him the future president. More and more optimistic, he neglected his plantations. His fixation with power gnawed away at him. He was always leaving for Port-au-Prince, by boat and on horseback, each time returning more disappointed and visibly older.

“We have only a few hundred acres left,” my mother complained. “We are nearly ruined! What will become of our children?”

“Oh, my wife!” my father vituperated, “give me your support instead of your recriminations. Do you think that all those who have assumed the presidency just crossed their arms and put their feet up before their election?”

“But you will never be elected president,” my mother tried to reason with him.

“Enough!” my father ordered. “I will take you to Port-au-Prince just so you can witness my popularity with your own eyes. I bask in praise there, and my speeches are applauded with such force that I choke up with emotion. They don’t want brawlers and rebels anymore, they will choose an honest tiller of the soil like me to save the country from disaster. We are weighed down by debt. After I presented my plan for economic independence the audience carried me away in triumph. My wife, are you listening? In triumph I was carried away, and not by a band of flea-bitten bums but by men of culture who represent the cream of Port-au-Prince, the only sensible, capable and representative class of people.”

He noticed me, came toward me and said:

“Even though you refused to help me, you will choose the man of your dreams, I promise you that.”

He twirled his mustache, stuck out his chest and left.

“Down with Clamont!” we heard.

“Who dared say that?” my father roared.

Tonton Mathurin, dressed in his old houpland and beret, stepped out of the bushes where he was lying in wait.

“Me,” he shouted. “Clamont, you are nothing but a pitiful ignoramus, a pretentious and narrow-minded mulatto. The degree in agronomy you picked up in Paris would impress only an imbecile like yourself. A phony! You are nothing but a phony and I swear no man with any sense will back you. We have seen four incompetent men come to power, and that’s enough. That era is past before it even began.”

“Mathurin,” my father barked. “How dare you speak? You, the immoral one, shunned by society…”

“What society are you talking about, Clamont? The one made up of stubborn people like you who boast of being white and who close their doors in the faces of worthy black men? Have you forgotten your grandmother, Clamont, the black woman whose loas you still serve?”

“I have forgotten her in fact,” my father replied, pale with wrath.

“There is your eldest daughter to refresh your memory. I thank God for arranging things so well.”

A crowd gathered. Some listened smiling to Mathurin’s words, others like Laurent and Dr. Audier pulled my father by the sleeve to drag him home.

“He’s just a crazy old man,” Laurent whispered to him.

Hidden behind their blinds, the ones who dared not show themselves tried not to miss any of the spectacle. I saw their glowing eyes, heard their cruel muffled laughter, comments, judgments, against which my father could scarcely defend himself. My fear of him died that day. I had seen him blush before my eyes, shaken and beating a retreat. A vague premonition alerted me to the falseness of our situation, and I was surprised to find myself agreeing with Tonton Mathurin deep inside.

The next day, six masked men broke into Mathurin’s house and took him away. He came back three hours later, his clothes torn, his face bloody: he had been dragged into the woods and horribly beaten. He found my father, walked up to him and spat in his face.

“Coward!” he yelled. “You are not yet sitting in the presidential chair and you are already abusing your powers, you hypocrite. Look, all of you, I have spit in your candidate’s face.”

My father ran home, took down his rifle and fired at Mathurin, whom he fortunately missed. There was a rush to disarm him, and to calm him down and settle his bad blood my mother gave him two spoonfuls of castor oil that he swallowed without raising an eyebrow.

That evening, I thought for a long time before falling asleep… I remembered Mathurin’s insults, and realized that we had not once invited to our house the parents of Alcine Joseph and Élina Jean-François, two very smart black girls my friends and I knew at school. And the word prejudice became heavy with meaning for me…

A few days later, a French boat in our harbor supplied our merchants: glassware, lingerie, wines, liqueurs, clothes, jewelry graced the display windows, and my mother, spending our last reserves on my father’s advice, bought some linen and a new piece of crystal she was planning to exhibit at her next party. Three linen blouses embroidered with lace and ribbons were added to my trousseau, and the night before the party my mother spread on my bed a frilly white silk dress, black leather slippers and a beaded velvet purse. We had sent out many invitations and my father, who was to leave for Port-au-Prince on the French boat in three days, invited the officers on board that he knew. Dora’s twenty-year-old cousin Georges, a pianist and a talented poet, was to play contredanses and waltzes.

The coffee harvest was at hand. My father paid a quick visit to the farmers and came back happy to report that there would soon be sacks full of coffee and then of money.

“I rule like a lion king over my land,” he said laughing. “The peasants are afraid of my ‘voodoo spells’ and they never steal from me.”

Was he a good enough actor to play at voodoo to keep his naïve farmers in check? I couldn’t answer that question.

It was July 3, 1915. A choking heat fell on the town. There was no breeze that morning to dry the sweat off the brows of our “little soldiers” pacing up and down the streets with rifles on their shoulders. Political discussions were rife and the news that arrived with students who disembarked from the French boat alarmed the patriots. According to them, representatives from the State Department had cornered President Sam and were negotiating a contract that would give them control over customs.

“If President Sam agrees to this contract with the United States, then all is lost,” Dr. Audier prophesied. “France and Germany will demand an equal share. Clamont is right, they will have the skin off our backs. It’s time he be put in charge.”

My father, despite his many disappointments, sacrificed two more bags of money in vain. A rumor went round that he was conspiring against the government, and one evening Augustine came to tell him that a man was asking to see him.

“What’s his name?” my father asked.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Is he well dressed?”

“No, sir.”

“Is he a beggar?”

“No, sir, but he is dark-skinned.”

Leaving Dr. Audier, M. Camuse, Laurent and my friends’ fathers in the living room, my father went down. He opened the door to the dining room and found himself in the presence of a black man of great physical stature, neatly dressed, with a straw hat that he quickly took off his head.

“I am Horelle Jean-François,” the man said to him in French. “Your oldest daughter knew my Élina at the school of the Holy Sisters.”

“I had no idea,” my father replied.

“Monsieur Clamont, be careful,” the man continued. “You have been denounced as a conspirator and the district commandant is keeping an eye on you. I came to warn you because I am also a supporter of yours.”

“Thank you, Jean-François,” my father answered. “I will take precautions.”

“I will bring you many followers. We must stand up against American interference in the nation’s private affairs.”

Élina was standing behind her father. I saw him reach out and grope for her.

“I am blind,” he explained.

“Ah,” my father grunted. “Would you like a chair?”

“No, Monsieur Clamont, thank you, I have to go. I’ll come back another time.”

“Jean-François,” my father then said, “if it’s all right, I would like to meet with you and your friends at Lion Mountain.”

“That’s fine, Monsieur Clamont, then I will come back here without them. Only my daughter will come with me.”

“No, no, don’t trouble yourself, I know your house, I will come to you myself.”

“That’s fine, Monsieur.”

He closed the door and then, noticing me:

“You, I always find you on my heels,” he said to me, as if he were ashamed of himself. “Is it true you knew this girl at the Sisters’?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Did she finish school?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Very well, very well, go inside and help your mother. There’s a lot to do today. Our guests will be here at eight.”

Indeed at that time the ship’s officers arrived in dress uniform. The table was adorned with food and wine, taking on the elaborate and well-appointed look of a Roman feast. The new glassware spread out on the ecru lace tablecloth began to fill with champagne and wine. Georges Soubiran sat at the piano and launched into a waltz by Chopin, and couples began to dance. Frilly dresses whirling in the lamplight! Hairdos embellished with pearls and diamonds! Bare necks almost as white as the pearls arrayed on them. Busts delicately pressing against taffeta ribbons that fell in butterfly wings down the back! Black pants, frock coats and audaciously twisted mustaches! Masculine hair, blond and black, gleaming with fragrant pomade! Elegant movements of the hands and feet! Clever cunning glances! Arched waists and elegant bows! And the flowing champagne helped me and my friends overcome our shyness. The trembling fingers we rested delicately on the arms of our dancing partners betrayed us, and I remember my teeth chattering in front of the handsome French officer who bowed before me.

“You are very original, Mademoiselle,” he said, taking me in his arms.

I lowered my head and didn’t respond.

“Could it be because the atmosphere of this Haitian salon this evening reminds me of Paris that I find you so alluring? Only you possess that warm color that island people have. You must believe me when I say that, for us, you are like a black goddess come down from her throne to welcome us lowly mortals.”

The compliment, too nicely turned, rang false in my ears.

I thought he was making fun of me. I let go of his hand and ran away.

At the beginning of the ball, I had already noticed myself in the mirror, in my white dress, standing between Dora, Eugénie and Jane, and felt I looked like a fly in a bowl of milk. I was surrounded by respect and flattery owing only to my social position. Who would dare shun the daughter of a white-mulatto like Henri Clamont, owner of the best house on Grand-rue and six hundred acres of coffee, as though she were no better than Élina Jean-François or Alcine Joseph? I felt out of place among the French crewmen, our European store owners and the handpicked mulattoes. My mother found me in bed in my ball gown, weeping, head buried in my pillow.

“What now, Claire?”

“I feel sick, Mama.”

“In that case, get undressed. I’ll tell the guests you had to be excused.”

A quarter of an hour later I was in my nightgown and had slipped under the sheets when I saw Dora come in.

“What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing, I just don’t feel well.”

“That handsome officer is asking for you. He told your father that you were the prettiest black girl he had ever seen. You know, Claire, these foreigners are stupid. If your skin is a little tanned, they think you’re black.”

“Leave me alone. I’m tired.”

“Frantz Camuse just arrived. He returned by boat. Try to get up.”

“No, leave me alone, Dora, I’m begging you.”

“Madame Camuse told me: ‘Go get Claire, she is no more sick than I am, and Frantz will be disappointed not to see her.’”

“No, I really am sick. Go tell Madame Camuse and let me be.”

When she left, I quietly jumped off my bed and cracked open the door. They seemed to have forgotten about me. Smiling his cruel feline smile, my father waltzed with Mlle Verduré, who was virtually swooning. His black hair was parted along a line that seemed glued to his skull, and his white face looked swollen. My eyes sought out my mother. Limp, fat, and white, she was sitting between Mme Duclan and Mme Audier, who inspired petty comparisons with an ugly doll Félicia had. Eugénie was waltzing with Frantz, and Dora and Jane with two French officers. I closed the door and went back to bed. The music prevented me from sleeping until the guests left. Georges Soubiran, Dora’s poor relation who was tolerated out of compassion, was harnessed to the piano and played nonstop until two in the morning.

***

Agnès Grandupré grew up under quarantine. She was erased from our lives, and I sometimes forgot she even existed. I caught a glimpse of her only at mass, where her arrival always provoked whispers and distraction. Gaunt, her feverish eyes glued to her prayer book, she held herself straight, chin proudly held high; her reserve was moving. It had been long since she had stopped visiting old Mathurin and she led a dignified and modest life. But society, spiteful and querulous, always seeking sacrificial victims, never forgave her. Her parents themselves had fueled the scandal by punishing her so spectacularly, for fear people would say they weren’t raising her right. “That nasty little Grandupré girl next door,” Mme Duclan called her. And even Mlle Verduré, whom I had once caught kissing my father at the piano and who was unmarried at thirty-five, would raise her eyes to heaven and cry out: “And she dares hold her head high!” This young woman’s tragic face seemed to conceal something other than vice. One day Georges Soubiran recited poems of such infinite sadness and refinement, and then admitted they were by Agnès. He was an orphan. Dora’s parents, with whom he lived, accused him of having spoken to Agnès and ordered him to break up with her. He packed his bags and left in response. Mathurin took him in. This time the scandal went too far and became the talk of the town. Agnès and Georges were in love and met at Mathurin’s for several days. The Granduprés almost beat their daughter to death and locked her inside the house. Tonton Mathurin stood in the middle of the street hurling insults at the “idiots and provincial bourgeois,” barged into the Grandupré house and went up to Agnès’s room. She was in bed, burning with fever. He knelt at her bedside and spoke to her softly. Then he got up and asked the flummoxed Granduprés for Agnès’s hand on behalf of Georges Soubiran.

“He is poor, and she is not rich either. I have money enough for both of them. They will not be in need,” he announced to them.

Then he went down to the street again.

“I am a black man,” he shouted, “and I spit in your faces. Dreadful are you who see evil everywhere. You soil every noble feeling with your stifled and bastardly minds. I am certain that God spits on this province as I do, and the day will come when you shall feel the weight of His mighty and avenging hand.”

Curious onlookers gathered on the veranda and crossed themselves piously. Eight days later, Dr. Audier was woken up in the middle of the night. He only had time to throw on a robe as his servant led him by flickering candlelight to the Granduprés’. Agnès was already coughing up blood, and she died in Georges Soubiran’s arms, holding old Mathurin’s hand.

Her parents seemed to be in a daze. Sitting by the coffin of their only child, they watched a procession of heads go by that only yesterday had been turned away from them. Then Mathurin rose:

“We will bury Mademoiselle Grandupré without you,” he shouted. “Let her at least rest in peace.”

And Mme Grandupré, suddenly feeling her pain, ignored my mother’s outstretched hand.

I looked at Agnès, so pale and white that I envied her. Her hands were clasped on her chest, and Georges Soubiran was kneeling near the coffin in tears. I wish I died in her place, I told myself. Pursing her lips, my mother then pushed me aside and we left the Grandupré house. I stole away from home and followed the funeral procession up to the cemetery. Standing beside the freshly dug grave, Georges Soubiran recited one of Agnès’s poems and swore that her name would be forever engraved in literature…

The terrible political news that reached us that evening by way of a few passengers off the British boat prevented my parents from punishing what they called my insubordination. It was July 27, 1915, a dreadful date that would forever destroy my father’s political ambitions, ruin his good health and lead him straight to his grave.

The next day, we were still in bed when we were startled by Dr. Audier’s voice calling for my father.

“Clamont! Port-au-Prince is up in arms. The Palais National was attacked and the political prisoners were shot.”

“Where did you hear this?” asked my father, looking haggard, his hair disheveled.

“From a student, Justin Rollier. He arrived on horseback last night.”

Then Laurent arrived, out of breath, to announce that President Sam had been assassinated.

“They broke into the French embassy where the president had sought refuge. They murdered him. His body was mutilated and dragged in the streets… Ah Clamont, I can’t go on, I really can’t…”

“What?” screamed my father. “Speak, Laurent, I beg of you.”

“The Americans!”

“What? What about the Americans?”

“Their troops have landed at Bizoton. They are taking every key position in the capital.”

“Laurent! Come now!” my father said as gently as possible, “have you lost your mind?”

“Alas! No, Clamont.”

He didn’t notice Dr. Audier gesturing in protest behind my father’s back. He brought in Justin Rollier, still covered in mud from his long trip on horseback.

“Tell him, Justin. Tell Monsieur Clamont what you saw with your own eyes.”

He noticed me at the door of my room in my nightgown and he stuttered in embarrassment. I quickly shut the door, threw on my robe and went down to find Augustine in her quarters.

“Up already, Mademoiselle Claire?” she exclaimed in astonishment.

“I’ll have my coffee here.”

“Yes, Mademoiselle.”

“Give me some bread and butter, too.”

“There, Mademoiselle… I’ll see if Mademoiselle Félicia is up now, and then I’ll come back to get a tray for Madame and Sir.”

I heard a scream and rushed upstairs: my father lay on the ground before Justin Rollier, and Laurent was helping Dr. Audier undress him.

“By God,” the doctor muttered, “I tried to tell you to keep quiet. To give this kind of news to such an excitable man without preparing him, just madness!”

“Lord! Lord!” was all Laurent could say.

My mother ran up in her nightgown and began screaming as well.

“Stay calm, Madame Clamont,” Dr. Audier said. “He’s just passed out, that’s all. Consider the child you are carrying.”

And turning to me:

“Claire, take your mother back to her room and send Augustine here with a basin and some towels.”

Despite several bleedings, my father died the same day. Six months later, my mother gave birth to a little girl as white as Félicia. She held her out to me and said: “Raise her, my daughter, like your father raised you, and take your sisters under your wing to keep them from sin.” Three years later, she died as well, of an unknown disease that Dr. Audier was inspired to call… lassitude.

In the meantime, one morning the American Marines arrived on our shores, taking control of the police station, the Customs House, the Public Works and the Sanitation Department. They dismissed some and appointed others. They built a new hospital, dug new gutters and cleaned up the town. All the “little soldiers” disappeared, as did the district commandant and his bicorne hat. They were dismissed for reasons of health and were replaced by others selected by a low-ranking American officer according to their physical build. We also learned that there was to be a new police force. This was an occupation, with all the humiliations and benefits an occupation brings for a poor, undisciplined, indebted people, their strength sapped by all of its internecine struggles. Dr. Audier flatly refused a position as head of the new hospital. M. Bavière and M. Duclan, mayor and prefect respectively, submitted their resignations. All those on the payroll of President Dartiguenave’s government [23] were lumped together by our nationalists and labeled “dirty collaborators.” The years went by. Some died, others were born. The Syrians reinstalled themselves in our town, and little by little we got used to the khaki uniforms worn by the Americans and our policemen. We familiarized ourselves with certain American expressions like “goddamn” or “son of a bitch.” Then there was the uprising: the Marchaterre Massacre, [24] the student strike, and finally, in 1934, the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Students returning from Port-au-Prince told us how they witnessed, with tears in their eyes, the restoration of our flag over the barracks built by Leconte, where it hadn’t flown since 1915… But let’s return to what my life was like during that stretch of time.

And so one day I suddenly found myself the head of a family with about sixty acres that had been saved by some miracle from my father’s costly ambitions. Right away I faced countless difficulties. I was only nineteen years old and I now regretted that I did not go with my father to the fields more often. However, to imitate him and to prove my competence, twice a week I got up before my sister, whom I left with Augustine, mounted my horse and galloped to Lion Mountain. Papa Cousineau, the voodoo priest, had died a few months before my mother did and his hut was sealed forever. Unlike my father, I was neither feared nor respected. The 540 acres he had sold to pay for his electoral campaign had come into the hands of black peasants who now worked for themselves. With my ridiculous reserve and coldness, I confronted Alcius, Louisor and a few other peasants whom we hired during harvest. I would give orders, squint at processing equipment I knew nothing about, and return home convinced of the futility of my visits. The first year, Louisor brought me a meager sum of money that he assured me came from the sale of the coffee, and I accepted it without protest. The second year, I received a much smaller amount. The price of coffee had gone down, he told me, and I only owned sixty acres. Was he trying to discourage me until I gave up my land to him for a pittance?

“At that rate,” I remarked, “we’ll soon have nothing to chew on.”

“Business is bad,” he replied.

And in the look he gave me I thought I saw bad faith, verging on hatred.

I then tried to win them over. I brought clothing for their wives, rum for the men, I went to their homes with candy for the children, cleverly trying to buy their devotion by spoiling them. I learned the hard way that it wasn’t enough, because the next year I got even less money from Louisor.

It was around then that a German named M. Petrold settled here. He bought up coffee, shipped it on a German vessel and began to grow wealthy. Soon, there was a rumor he was trying to set up his own factory and was eyeing Lion Mountain and wanted to buy it. I went to see Dr. Audier for advice.

“I’m not getting anything from the farmers anymore and I’m struggling to make ends meet,” I admitted to him.

“Are you thinking of selling what’s left of Lion Mountain?” he asked me.

“Yes, if the German gives me a good price. All we have left is about sixty acres, but the factory is worth its weight in gold.”

“Do you authorize me to speak to Monsieur Petrold on your behalf?”

“Please do so, Doctor, I need help.”

To ruin the peasants and get my revenge on them, I set the price for my coffee myself that year and gave preference to M. Petrold.

“Who fixed the price of their coffee at twelve centimes? Who is the greedy swine pushing us into bankruptcy?” the peasants yelled the next day at M. Petrold’s door.

Concealed in my room behind the blinds, I could see the peasants raising their fists at my house.

“You don’t want to sell?” M. Petrold was saying to them. “So go home with your coffee. If Lion Mountain is selling coffee at twelve centimes, why should I pay you more?”

“Maybe Lion Mountain has a secret way of breeding money,” one peasant shouted, “some big secret that put the Lion and his wife in their grave. But thank God, we’re still kicking, and Lion Mountain will have to answer for this wicked deed.”

My father’s farmers paid with their lives for my brilliant idea, because about twenty planters armed with machetes descended on our land and slaughtered them. The next day, sitting stiff and straight on my horse, I saw with my own eyes the bloody bodies of our farmers, their wives and children, all hacked to pieces. The killers were caught and the rural administrator brought them to jail. The police, represented by a soft, inexperienced young lieutenant, could not prevent retaliation. No one dared openly attack me, the daughter of a great despotic and merciless landowner, but I was responsible for everything and everyone knew it. I finally received the young lieutenant, who questioned me about my coffee plantation.

“My farmers were stealing from me. So I sold my coffee to Monsieur Petrold at a price that was too low. That’s all,” I explained, “and they took it out on my farmers.”

“You are a terrible businesswoman,” he replied. “To avoid such incidents in the future, get some advice before doing anything.”

I thanked him, and almost in spite of himself he added:

“It seems as if things will get more complicated. To get revenge, the peasants have sent emissaries to Port-au-Prince. They bought the silence of the rural administrator, and what was initially a matter of private order seems to be taking on terrible proportions.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged and left without adding a word.

Eight days later, a terrible hurricane flattened the coffee, tore the roofs off houses and drowned the cattle. For forty-eight hours, the skies were dark. Heavy black clouds, thick and suffocating, rolled along the horizon. A thin rain mixed with wind lashed the paving stones and by the end of the day began to whistle and scream, swelling the sea and flooding the rivers.

“Hurricane coming,” people cried from one window to the next.

Two hours later, all the doors were boarded up. I called for Demosthenes to shut himself in the house with us but he was gone. Augustine, my sisters and I were left to listen to the lamentation of the trees uprooted by the blasts of wind, the whistling of the roofs ripped from their beams that flew past us with a sinister beating of wings. Water invaded the Grand-rue and began to slowly filter out of the storm drains. It rose and soaked the furniture. We could hear awful screaming. The ground shook in protest. Everything moved. We found ourselves on the ground, clutching each other convulsively. The untold damage ruined most of the growers and herders. Many of us were killed, and Father Paul started going around to bless the dead and comfort the orphans. The Daughters of Mary, to whom I belonged, were asked to help, and the day after the cataclysm twelve young women dressed in the colors of the Virgin administered first aid to the wounded. I had no tears left by the time I threw myself upon the bodies of Demosthenes and of my horse, both found in the flooded river.

“We have been damned by our sins,” Father Paul preached to the small crowd of survivors gathered in the church. “God has punished us. We must repent and do penance. Blood was spilled. What right do we have to make our own justice when God is watching over us?”

Bodies were piled in the freshly made puddles. They were identified and the municipality inscribed their names on a list. The dead included: Tonton Mathurin, who had, we later learned, left his fortune to Georges Soubiran, who went to study in France; Laurent; Mme Marti; and all those who had in one way or another tried to rescue their possessions from destruction.

Up there, the mountains greened, resplendent despite the ruins, in spite of death. All of nature seemed to rise up purified from the squalls. At Lion Mountain, the coffee plants lay destroyed and uprooted atop a foot of soil that had been churned up by spindrift. In town, waterlogged goods piled up unrecognizable in the stinking muddy shopwindows. Haitian and Syrian storekeepers alike were crying and wailing. Of course, those hit hardest were the peasants. Homeless and destitute, they came down the mountain to swell the ranks of the beggars. The harsh sun returned after the hurricane and dried out the enormous mounds of garbage choking the streets. Mud turned to dust, a thick, blinding dust that became a whirlwind at the slightest breeze. Typhoid, malaria, and influenza kept everyone in their sickbed. Poor children died every day by the dozen for lack of care. Father Paul continued to draw on our devotion and the Daughters of Mary worked like galley slaves. Eugénie Duclan, Jane Bavière, Dora Soubiran and I helped Mme Camuse, whom Father Paul made president of the Relief Association. Mme Marti, our dressmaker, had died under rather mysterious circumstances. She was found at her home, her neck half-slit. “She tried to save our little dog! She ran in to get our little dog!” her children sobbed. Mme Camuse took them in. Fifty coffins were blessed in a ceremony attended even by the least pious among us. Father Paul’s sermons spared no one. Our bloodstained land had been washed clean by God’s mighty waters, he repeated, and the wind, he hoped, had by the same measure cast out the Evil Spirit. One strange detail troubled me, however: M. Petrold’s house had suffered no damage, and at that moment I began reconsidering God’s ways. Despite the failure of the harvest, M. Petrold bid on our piece of land and bought my factory, my piano and the sixty remaining acres of Lion Mountain. Discouraged, many of the landowners followed my example and sold their fields and went to work for him. I had put my money in the bank, following Dr. Audier’s advice. I calculated that by living frugally, we could hold out for a few years. Life stretched before me flat and hard, without joy or surprise, and I lost hope of ever getting married.

When the streets were nearly cleared by the prisoners and other volunteers, we received a delegation of doctors and an American commission who arrived by boat from Port-au-Prince. The State Department, without any bitterness, played its philanthropic role, for the Americans had left our country four years ago. I saw Frantz Camuse at his mother’s. He seemed astonished by my self-assurance. His eyes had acquired a kind of acuity, no doubt due to his profession, and he looked at me for a long time.

“What’s happening to our province?” he asked me. “There is much talk of it in Port-au-Prince as a perpetual source of turmoil.”

“I don’t understand…”

“The killings, the clan feuds have been brought to the attention of the police. Your district commandant is about to be replaced by another, who, from what I hear, will know how to keep you in line. What happened on your land, Claire?”

“I no longer have any land,” I answered dryly. “Lion Mountain no longer belongs to the Clamonts.”

He walked me home, indifferent but friendly. For eight days, he bandaged the wounded and gave as much help as he could. Once I caught him shaking his head before a child whose legs had been shattered by a fallen tree.

“We are cursed, according to Father Paul,” I whispered.

He frowned and looked at me without answering and then leaned over his patient. When he finished with the bandage, he looked up and said:

“You are quite changed, Claire.”

“For better or worse?”

“I don’t know. But something in you rings false.”

“So then, for the worse,” I said triumphantly. And I pressed my lips together tight.

Imbecile! I felt like yelling at him. I’m not the little prude you once knew, take me in your arms.

He left two days later without trying to see me again.

That very evening, I received the lieutenant, who came with Jane. She was pretty, lively, spontaneous. The lieutenant loved her and wanted to marry her. From where I sat, I could see movement behind Mme Bavière’s blinds; like all mothers in this town, she tyrannized and spied on her daughter. I gently closed my door to prevent her from seeing what was going on in my house. How did I become so open-minded if not from the desire to avenge my strict upbringing? Rebelling against everything that had been branded upon me, I insisted on destroying all myths without seeming to do so and was shaking off my yoke in secret. Through the open door, Annette mischievously spied on the enlaced lovers. Soon enough I saw her hanging off Jacques Marti’s neck, kissing him on the lips. I smiled. She dared do what I, sixteen years her senior, never could. Frantz Camuse was lost to me forever; I knew that all hope of getting married was to be buried. What man here could ever replace him?

But then one day Justin Rollier returned from Port-au-Prince. Twelve years had passed since my father’s death. We saw each other again with pleasure, and in the evenings once again a man’s voice could be heard in the house. Annette caressed and kissed him and kept repeating that he was the handsomest man in this province. Had all three of us been in love with him? Félicia smiled calmly over her embroidery while Augustine and I set the table as quietly as possible and served our guest. Once, I caught Félicia staring at him and realized then that she too could become a dangerous rival one day. Justin was cheerful. He sang beautiful love songs for us and recited poetry.

“My three Graces!” he cried out one evening before the charming group we made under the lamplight.

“Which do you prefer?” Annette asked. “Which of us do you find most beautiful?”

“My heart cannot choose between the three of you,” he answered laughing, but his eyes met mine in a very loving way.

Annette was just a child. Justin was thirty years old. In private, he gave me one of his poems and asked me to wait three years for him. The deadline he had given himself to find a position and save up a little money so he could start a family.

“I am leaving, Claire, I have to. But if you promise to wait for me, I will come back and I will marry you. Three years go by quickly. At least that’s what we’ll tell ourselves to be more patient…”

I didn’t even have the guts to give him my hand.

When he returned, Annette was fifteen. She jumped on his neck but in a different way. He defended himself, sought me with his eyes, but he stared at Annette with admiration. He was visiting just as often as before, but he wasn’t coming for me, as I quickly realized. Annette had eclipsed me without even trying, and in comparison I could feel the decline of my youth. One night I caught them kissing and I ran to my room and locked myself in.

“I love Justin,” Annette told me the next day, “and he loves me. Oh! Claire, I’m so happy!”

We learned of her engagement at the same time we learned of Jane’s. Three months later, Justin died of pneumonia and Jane’s lieutenant in a car accident on his way to Port-au-Prince where he had been recalled.

Annette cried, then forgot. Jane, however, was pregnant. I was the first to whom she confessed this. Tattooed as I was by my bourgeois upbringing, I feared the responsibility and abandoned her in her distress. Her parents shut her away. She fled. I let her run without helping her. During the five years she lived in the lowly quarter where girls from good families were forbidden to go, I avoided talking to her or even greeting her. I think this is the only mistake for which I reproach myself. A few days after the death of the lieutenant, a new district commandant arrived by the name of Calédu.

With this name I will return to the present. Dawn rises on my sleepless night. I have tried to revive without too much distortion those I have known and those cut down by death. I don’t know to what extent I have succeeded. This resurrected past appeared to me as through a thick veil behind which I have evolved separate from my real self: an astonished spectator of my own life.

The corner grocer is the latest victim. I just learned this from an overexcited Mme Audier. This somewhat undermines Dr. Audier’s diagnosis regarding Calédu’s attacks against the bourgeois class. Mme Potiron’s little grocery has literally been pillaged.

“The agenda is not the same this time,” Dr. Audier explained to Jean Luze. “Believe me, Madame Potiron will not be tortured. The armed beggars have to eat, don’t they? Jacques Marti’s murder, the arrest of the poets, the arrest of the grocer, all reveal the excessive zeal of a soldier hoping to attract the attention of his superiors and earn distinction. But the torture inflicted on a certain category of women conceals something else.”

“What do you mean?” Jean Luze asked.

“Well, simply that our commandant must have often been humiliated by our beautiful bourgeois women and is now avenging himself in his own fashion.”

“Class again!” Jean Luze said, frowning.

“And color. I don’t think I need to tell you that in this black nation, color prejudice is as subtle and dangerous as in the United States.”

“Have the blacks in this country suffered that much?”

“To be honest, yes,” Audier confided, lowering his head.

“Does that really mean Calédu needs to act like a savage?” Félicia then said. “We’ve tried to accommodate his sensitivities. We opened our doors to him. What more can he want?”

“For you to welcome him as a friend, perhaps,” Dr. Audier answered, “or for one of our beautiful ‘aristocrats’ to agree to marry him.”

“Oh no! Never that!” Félicia protested. “The concessions to which we’ve stooped are quite enough. And besides, who but Annette could be to his liking? All we have left is a bunch of old hags.”

“Félicia, dear!” Jean Luze said, “take it easy, this topic always upsets you.”

“I hate them, I hate them,” she stammered, Jean Luze’s hand on her cheek. “Annette’s marriage has already lowered our standing. I kept quiet. I put up with everything. But it was horrible…”

“Now do you see what I mean?” Dr. Audier asked, shaking his head at Jean Luze. “I wasn’t exaggerating, as you can see.”

“Yes, but between us,” he answered, “Calédu and the others in power do nothing to make themselves likable. One is a vulgar criminal and the others are vile upstarts ready to do anything to fill their pockets. Surely there must be men of a different caliber somewhere in this country.”

“Well, you are beginning to get it, then, and for once you have come to the heart of the matter,” Dr. Audier said jubilantly “Do you think, my friend, that people worth their salt would act like Calédu or like Monsieur Trudor? They have been chosen precisely because of what they represent.”

“Yes. But their abuses can only make things worse.”

“They have found an opportunity to take revenge, to have their turn at humiliating us…”

And suddenly turning toward Mme Audier, who hadn’t said a word:

“You, my wife,” he said, “what did you once tell me after I invited Dr. Béranger for dinner?”

“That I had never seen blacks at my parents’ table,” she answered impatiently.

“And the same was true for the Clamonts,” Dr. Audier continued, “and for the Camuses, the Duclans, and the Soubirans, the same was true for all of us.”

“Too bad the commandant is a criminal,” Jean Luze then said, looking straight ahead, “because otherwise I might sympathize with him. In any case, he has made himself the representative of hatred and violence and no honest man could agree to absolve him.”

“By no means,” Dr. Audier concluded. “He has gone about it altogether badly. They should all go to hell!”

And seized with panic, he sprang to the door, opening it slightly in order to inspect the street…

Yes, maybe they’re right to behave the way they do, I then told myself. Yes, maybe I would be just as covetous if I were in their shoes, and just as ruthless. One thing remains true: hatred only breeds hatred.

Calédu recently spit in my path with contempt. His armed beggars are aggressive and act as if they were great leaders in their rags. They track us down like wild beasts. We walk around like beaten dogs, tails between our legs and noses to the ground. Terrorized and tamed by flea-bitten bums and upstarts. How humiliating!…

Last night’s dream disturbs me still: I was alone, standing in broad daylight in the middle of an immense arena framed by stands filled with agitated, terrifying crowds. They were screaming and calling me out and pointing at me with their fingers. What were they accusing me of? I ran, ashamed of my nakedness, looking in vain for a dark corner where I could hide, when suddenly I saw a stone statue before me. At that moment, the crowd’s cries became deafening. The statue, with its enormous phallus stiffened in a voluptuous and painful spasm, was of Calédu. The statue came to life and the phallus wagged feverishly. I threw myself at its feet, submissive and rebellious, hardly daring to look up, my thighs shut tight. I heard cries: “Kill, kill!” The crowd was cheering on Calédu to murder me. Cold metal caressed the skin of my neck as ferocious laughter replaced the screaming of the suddenly silent spectators. The weapon sank slow and deep into my flesh. For a long time I remained immobile, frozen in terror. Then, rising, I walked in a thick mist, my hands in front of me, beheaded, with my head dangling on my chest. Dead and living through my death…

Such nightmares are familiar to me now. How many times have I been chased by mad bulls, by low beasts, monsters, all wanting to rape or kill me? When I was a little girl, I often dreamed that my father had been transformed into a roaring two-legged creature with a lion’s mane, whipping me as I searched in vain for the key that would release me from his cage!

We were invited to spend the day at the Trudors’. Jean-Claude could have been my excuse to stay home but Félicia wants to take him along because of the beach.

“I know you,” Annette said to me, “no last-minute cancellation. I’ll go get you myself if the Luzes come without you.”

So, whether I liked it or not, I had to go.

The prefect’s modern villa is the only beautiful building in our area. It looks ostentatiously out of place beside our old buildings with their twenty doors and windows and their balconies and gables, which instantly evoke the original history of a fabulous past. If, as Mme Trudor said the other night, her husband serves the Republic for peanuts, then he must also have discovered a gold mine. In the midst of their chandeliers, silk curtains and carpets, you forget all about the beggars and become convinced you have been transported into another world. It is less hot today. The sea is before us. The water is so calm that one can look on its sandy depths undulating as far as the eye can see. Under a veranda covered with bougainvillea in bloom, Mme Trudor is frantically arranging a monumental buffet, and she greets me with enthusiasm.

“At last, an intelligent person who can help me with this,” she says to me. “These servants can be so dumb!…”

Does she think, as I do in fact, that my place is in the pantry? In any case, I’ll be kept busy and that’s fortunate. I feel ill at ease beside these half-naked women. Félicia has put Jean-Claude down on some cushions at her feet and Annette is cooing over him, posing in adoration. Jean Luze is chatting with M. Trudor, drinking whiskey on the rocks. He seems pretty cheerful. The sight of so much female flesh must not be unpleasant for him. I catch him staring somewhat frequently at a tall bimbo with tanned skin, a very fashionable girl from Port-au-Prince staying with the Trudors and playing the ingénue. He goes inside to get changed and comes back in bathing trunks. Mme Trudor and I are the only ones not swimming. It would amuse me to see her half-naked. It doesn’t flatter me to be paired with her. Do they think I don’t have a good body? Even Annette doesn’t have my sculpted abdomen. Félicia wears a more decent bathing suit, probably to hide her bulges. She doesn’t suffer from false shame; she’s lucky that way.

Gleaming with sweat, M. Trudor prances among the ladies, happy to play the pasha in his luxury villa. He gives Jean Luze a tour of the house, waving his finger in the air.

“You are an intellectual, one can sense that. Come, I will show you something you will appreciate.”

He takes him to the library to let him admire his books. One gets the feeling that they are sitting there for show. Perhaps they have never been opened.

After they leave, I take a look around the library: it’s actually a very good one. I gaze for a moment at the nude body of Salammbô [25] embraced by a colorful snake on a morocco leather cover; I quickly scan a few familiar titles suddenly made less appealing in their pompous finery, and then sneak away to mingle with the others outside.

During dinner, the girl from Port-au-Prince turns to Jean Luze. They go around the buffet together chatting. She offers to guide him; there she is, picking out dishes he points to with his finger. I look for Félicia. She is cradling Jean-Claude and sipping a cool drink.

They say people are always disappointing the more you get to know them. Is it because I hope to be disappointed that I watch Jean Luze’s every move? Everything I have seen of him has only increased my admiration. Even his harshness toward Annette is justified in my eyes. Repression has given me the nose of a good hunting dog. I can smell the squirming of others’ thoughts merely by dilating my nostrils. Despite reassuring appearances, my nose tells me things aren’t going well for Félicia.

She who is generally so confident now seems to give off something nervous and unstable. She always remakes others in her own image. Even after the scene she witnessed with her own eyes, she still somehow sees Jean Luze as a man without weaknesses, a man Annette provoked in vain. In the same way, she also refuses to admit that Jean-Claude has worn her out. He must be the best baby in the world for he is her son. Despite the sleepless nights, she insists that he only cries when he’s hungry. I shudder to see her being so stubborn as to banish the thought that he could get sick.

More nonexistent than ever, I continue to keep my vigil. I am so dull that I have become colorless. In any case, that’s the only way to escape being bad-mouthed. At least they have left me alone. Even Father Paul gives me communion without confession, as it were. He could cite me as an example in his sermons. Does he really believe in purity? I would call purity a total ignorance of the torments of the flesh or else the triumph of the will over them. If this victory can, according to religion, save the soul, how can one explain the sexual stirrings of a woman who has lived in eternal chastity.

I can hardly imagine my life outside this house. It shelters all the sad memories of my childhood and my youth. Running away might heal me of my passion. But the thought of leaving makes me sick. As shabby as it is, this province is the apple of my eye. Could I really break all my habits if Jean Luze were to take me with him? Am I nursing impossible hopes? Aren’t the friendship and admiration he has for me strengthening these hopes? Nevertheless, mysterious as he may be, have I not put my finger on his weakness? After all, he almost gave in to Annette. In fact, he did give in to her completely and lied to Félicia.

He’s grown friendly with Joël Marti. They talk about music and literature. I am astonished to see him so animated. He gets all worked up during these conversations and is full of exuberance.

“But no, no, you’re wrong, Chopin is still a poet, a melancholy poet, a musician for neurotics; Beethoven personifies courage in suffering, the struggle against misfortune. His infirmity enriched him instead of diminishing him. His behavior should be an example for us. All of his compositions are hymns to life. Listen…”

He plays Chopin’s Concerto no. 1 for a minute and then Beethoven’s Concerto no. 5.

“Compare them,” he adds.

“Well, my old phonograph doesn’t have the same sound. It’s a very old machine, you know.”

Jean Luze laughs, he is happy. He needed friends! I bring them glasses, ice and what is left of the whiskey M. Long brought.

“No, Claire, some rum, Joël prefers rum and lately so do I,” Jean Luze tells me.

He leans over Joël.

“You are only twenty years old,” he tells him, “and you live in an outdated world. I will guide you. What authors do you like? It’s amazing to discover someone like you in a place like this, someone so curious, educated, enthusiastic and sensitive.”

“A lot of those arrested by Calédu were like me, hungry for more education. There were many of us here writing poetry, interested in music and literature. Our meetings were forbidden. We protested and they hunted us down. Some have disappeared and others have fled. I would like to leave too but, sadly, I am too poor.”

His shaking hand reaches for the rum bottle, and he helps himself. Later in the day, I see him staggering home.

Jean Luze has no idea how easily these misunderstood poets can get drunk.

Maybe this vice of theirs brings them a false sense of transcendence.

I’m being unfair. They are right to seek distraction from their suffering, to drown their unhappiness in a sea of alcohol, because their future is as dark as an abyss…

***

Jean Luze now feels compelled to restrict Joël’s drinking. He even preaches to him about it.

“Take it easy, Joël, easy,” he said to him today, taking the rum bottle from his hands. “It’s a slippery slope.”

Joël, already drunk, doesn’t take it well.

“Oh no, absolutely no lectures please or I’ll drink elsewhere.”

He becomes abusive and Jean Luze calms him.

“I only want what’s right for you, you know.”

“I know, I know. But what bothers me about our friendship is that you will never understand…”

“Never understand what? That you want to get piss-drunk. No, I’ll never get that. I understood your despair better when you were trying to console yourself with poetry. All of you seem to think you have a monopoly on suffering. Nothing can better drag a nation into moral and intellectual bankruptcy than believing its misery is special.”

“And what do you know about misery?” Joël screams.

“I know what I know!”

“Do you know who my brother was? Do you know what he meant to me? When my parents died, he took care of me like a father. He was intelligent, honest. They drove him insane. It’s their fault, you hear me, their fault! And I too will go insane one day…”

“Oh, enough of that!” Jean Luze lashes out in a voice so forceful that the boy is startled. “Are you also going to throw yourself headfirst into the trap they’ve set for you? You want it to be your turn to serve as their target?”

Joël looks away.

“What’s the use, they’re going to get us all,” he mutters in a mournful and desperate voice. “We’re caught in the teeth of the gear and the only solution is flight or despair.”

“No, you have to fight.”

“With our bare fists?”

“You have to hope,” Jean Luze replies more gently. “Those who sow hatred will reap it one day. Those who beat and torture are only cogs in an already weak system. Behind their hatred lie other hatreds. You have to hold it together and wait for your moment.”

Joël listens to him passionately.

Oh, imagine following him in pursuit of some impossible dream! Yes, he’s an idealist. But how rejuvenating it is to hope wildly and even dream about building a new and better world.

Last night he entertained Joël’s friends. Sad poets, overcome with alcoholism, who stumble along the walls when the sun goes down. He has found people to protect, guide, advise. He feels he’s doing something useful with his life. Maybe thanks to them he will decide not to leave!

“Jean has finally made some friends,” Félicia says. “I hear Joël is incredibly intelligent, and that he likes music and books as well.”

How lonely he must have been! I am ashamed of us. Oh! What I wouldn’t give to get rid of my complexes. They stop me from opening my mouth and expressing my ideas even when I’m choking on them. We put all of our intellect in the service of profit and flattery Whatever Dr. Audier says, terror has turned us into resigned cowards. Who will help us? Who is fearless and has the courage to cry out the truth if not Jean Luze? I listen without taking part in any of these conversations. The screams wafting from the prison make both of us wince. “Filthy torturer! Filthy torturer!” he muttered the other night, angrily running his hand through his hair. He’ll end up making himself a suspect. I can see the moment when Calédu will accuse him of meeting with “suspicious intellectuals.” My silent hatred has even contaminated Félicia. “I can’t take it anymore,” she once burst out, covering her ears… She was so afraid of her own voice that she suddenly fell silent with her eyes closed and her mouth agape. And I could see her lashes trembling with tears.

Eugénie Duclan is getting married. She is happy as a lark, going door-to-door to announce the joyful event. Annette bursts out laughing when she shares the news with Félicia.

“Paul is sure that poor Charles has been ‘past it’ for ages, if you know what I mean. Eugénie will be so disappointed! But who would think to get married at that age!”

She takes me as her witness.

It seems that past a certain age, marrying for the sake of convenience is as ridiculous as marrying for love. Custom is as powerful as fashion-impossible to disregard either without giving offense.

Eugénie Duclan

is so bold

at forty years old

to let it all hang…

sings Annette. She did not invent the song, everyone knows it, as she is amused to tell Félicia.

Eugénie wants a first-class wedding and dares invite me to be part of her procession along with the other Daughters of Mary. She has done her hair and made herself up like a young girl. It looks like she’s wearing a wrinkled, sexless, tragic mask.

“I know people are making fun of me,” she tells me, “but that’s too bad. Would you agree to be my maid of honor? We have to stick together…”

Who should stick together, and why?

I nearly throw her out after promising to do everything she wants. The only thing I’m afraid of is Jean Luze catching me in such grotesque company. I don’t care to belong to any sisterhood. The idea that I’m an old maid, set apart and original, pleases me…

Jean Luze is talking with Joël in the living room as Annette flits around them. Félicia is nursing Jean-Claude. Jean Luze is so absorbed in conversation that he doesn’t even notice Annette’s presence. He is leaning over Joël and speaking to him in a low voice. It’s Joël who seems distracted. His eyes follow Annette, and Jean Luze turns around angrily.

“Why are you buzzing around us?” he asks her.

“Me, buzzing around you?” she asks, taken aback. “But I’m doing no such thing.”

She runs downstairs and joins Félicia in the dining room.

“Apparently, I am a nuisance to our gentlemen and their philosophical discussions. I wonder what your husband thinks is so special about that little birdbrain.”

“He’s very cultivated for his age, Jean told me.”

“Bah! he’s a man all the same, isn’t he?”

“What do you expect? Intellectuals are interested in things besides women.”

“That’s a shame!”

Félicia yawns.

“But you yourself have nothing to complain about. Are you happy?” she asks Annette.

“Yes.”

“Paul is a good husband?”

“He’s a good lover.”

“What does that mean?”

Annette smiles wickedly and fixes a lock of hair on her lovely forehead.

“It means what it means. You’re no choir girl. It’s just that some husbands don’t do right by their wives. Making love is little more than an obligation for them. Wham bam, and that’s it! Such husbands are bad lovers; but others treat their wives like mistresses: they are good husbands and good lovers at the same time.”

“What theories!”

“Well, it’s not so bad in practice either, believe me.”

She said this protectively, sure of herself. Is she trying to diminish Jean Luze in Félicia’s eyes with these insinuating comparisons? Or was she offering her opinion of him in light of her more recent experience?

“I’m only telling you what Paul taught me,” she continues cruelly. “If a man is holding a woman in his arms and restrains himself, he’s either impotent or abnormal.”

I notice a worried look in Félicia’s eyes.

“Well, I assume that’s never happened to you,” she says weakly.

“It did, once.”

Félicia’s fingers curl around the arm of her chair.

“Ah! Well, what does any of this matter as long as people love each other,” she adds, annoyed.

“I used to think the same way before Paul.”

“So your Paul is a god?”

“No. He’s a black man and he knows how to take a woman. He is so passionate that all he would have to do is brush against your hand to desire you.”

“Don’t tell your friends about that.”

“I’ll kill anyone who comes near him.”

“You’re crazy,” Félicia replied simply.

But she was gasping.

The rain requires fresh processions, this time to make it stop. It’s raining interminably and, as luck would have it, right after the extensive clear-cutting of trees. For fifteen days, we have heard the whine of M. Long’s electric saw without interruption. A tree falls every five minutes. I crept around the coast yesterday to witness this bloodbath. Immense trees fell to the ground with what sounded like a great roar before their dying breath. The whole region had already been cleared and the peasants, harassed by Calédu, wore inscrutable, hostile, troubled faces. Avalanches of soil slid down the mountains and piled around their feet. Coffee is nothing but a memory for all of us. Timber export has replaced that business. When the wood is gone, he will go after something else. The slave trade, perhaps. He could easily ship hundreds from among the beggars. There’s been recent talk about hiring out peasants to cut sugarcane in the Dominican Republic. This was mentioned in the Port-au-Prince newspapers that Dr. Audier regularly receives. A commission composed of doctors, typists and accountants is expected to arrive next week. The human trade known as Operation Fight the Famine has begun. Is M. Long also getting in on the scheme? Word has spread and the peasants are abandoning their bleached, bled-dry land to watch the cars arriving from Port-au-Prince. Their number swells day by day.

I hear that they’ve been reduced to eating dogs at Lion Mountain. “Why not? We do eat beef and goat, after all,” Annette says. I can see it coming, we’ll soon turn into cannibals. Many of us find this entertaining. “Ugh! Eating dog! It must taste awful! And what criminal instincts these children have!” Mme Audier opines. Eugénie Duclan simply accuses them of being gluttonous and abnormal. “There’s no other way to understand it. Other people’s problems are their own business, of course, that’s as sure as death.”

“In the street I see people so filthy that I want to throw up,” Annette complains. “It’s disgusting. They could at least wash.”

She is pregnant and her husband has taken the habit of imposing her upon us more and more. Is it so she won’t get suspicious? He always claims to be detained by business meetings. Annette goes after Félicia without mercy. She can hardly think what else to come up with next to hurt her and destroy her peace. Does she envy her, contrary to what she says? Tension is rising between them. Félicia can be pretty resourceful when it comes to defending her man.

“But I’m not talking about Jean,” Annette protests hypocritically. “What makes you think I am?”

Félicia’s lips are trembling. She has to restrain herself in order not to make it obvious she knows Annette is just a woman scorned. That’s my view of her as well. In any case, she’s getting her revenge on Félicia. The way you take revenge defines you: she does it in a petty, boorish way.

Showing up an hour late, Paul is greeted with cries of joy at the living room door. Annette looks around to make sure they are alone, and then changes her tone and expression:

“I don’t believe you and your business meetings,” she says angrily, “I don’t believe it.”

I can see the day when she comes to regret this union, and when Paul will reproach her in good Haitian fashion for not being a virgin on their wedding night.

The recruitment agents have arrived. They are lodged all over town and have set up shop in Mme Potiron’s former store. Hundreds of peasants pass through in single file, and are accepted or rejected depending on their health and age. Apparently some of them go so far as to purchase work permits from doctors who are exploiting the situation. Dr. Audier refused to issue health certificates to three patients with tuberculosis, but they left with the others anyway. In the distance, the abandoned mountains rise impassive. The recruiters are leaving tomorrow and the peasants are already piling into the trucks with sacks on their backs.

“Where are you going?” people ask them.

“Off to cut cane in the Dominican Republic.”

“For money?”

“Of course! Do we look like we would sweat for nothing in some white man’s country?”

“What do you have to do to get hired?”

“Go sign up at the desk. And if your health is no good, pay someone and you’ll get a spot for sure.”

“Will we come back rich at least?”

“Who knows. We’re going to try our luck.”

The mountains continue to empty out, growing even more impassive.

It’s amazing that the trade of our compatriots could leave us so cold.

“They’re going to seek their fortunes elsewhere,” Mme Audier told me. “They’re better off than we are.”

Félicia is steadfast in her principles. I am not unaware of this, but I go to Jane’s more and more often.

“You’re going too far, Claire,” she told me recently, “and you are setting a bad example for Annette. Don’t you think?”

“Jane needs help,” I responded.

“Fine, give in to your soft heart, send her some work, but don’t see her so often. Soon there will be gossip about this friendship, you know our little world.”

Father Paul went after me as well. I ran into him just as I was just about to go inside Jane’s home.

“What do you want in that girl’s house, my child?” he asked me.

“She’s making dresses for me.”

“Félicia is right. You are getting dresses made for yourself quite often these days. I don’t need to tell you these visits worry your sister and that she’s the one who alerted me. I hope there is nothing untoward in your relations with Jane Bavière.”

He leaned on his walking stick and looked like the grim reaper under his black robe. I’m not young anymore, and he should have realized this. But he had known me to be so fainthearted and timid that he refused to believe I’d changed.

“What do you mean, Father?”

“Life has denied you certain pleasures, my child; try not to seek them in sin.”

“There is no call for such vile accusations,” I answered, shaking with rage.

“I am a priest, I am fulfilling my priestly duty in protecting you from yourself…”

I interrupted him impertinently.

“Yes, but I don’t like priests who preach slander by example.”

“You are defending those who live in sin so bitterly that you have forgotten yourself in this case. I don’t recognize you anymore. Don’t you know that men visit her at night?”

I turned my back on him and went to knock on Jane’s door. She immediately realized I was beside myself.

“You’re shaking,” she said, “are you sick?”

She read my silence. Her face became sad.

“They’re giving you a hard time on account of me, aren’t they?” she continued. “I know they condemn me. Your friendship is precious to me but I won’t ask you to come back.”

She had me sit and then returned to her work.

“I don’t know how to make these people happy,” she continued. “Because I had a child outside of wedlock, I am guilty of every possible sin; you deprived yourself of everything, yet they don’t spare you either. I really don’t know how to make them happy.”

She took her son in her arms and kissed him tenderly.

“Well, I’m happy, too bad for them,” she added.

“I’m not.”

She pushed the child toward me.

“Give Claire a kiss too,” she said. “Give her a big hug.”

And the child, putting his arms around me, gave me a gentle peck on the cheek.

“He’ll be a man soon enough,” Jane added. “And you’re never lonely with a man when you love him.”

I am surprised by my interest in Jean Luze and Joël Marti’s discussions. They could never accuse me of buzzing around them. No, I sit too humbly in my chair with my sewing. Who would ever look askance at me? Therein lies my strength. I am also surprised by the sympathy I suddenly feel for Joël. This Joël whose birth I witnessed without ever taking the slightest interest in him. That was true even when he became an orphan, because you can look without seeing, meet without knowing, give without sharing. From the outset, I refused to have anything to do with others and remained neutral. Now I am becoming too human, too involved. It’s Jean Luze’s fault. It’s dangerous. I am taking on too much. I am making everything my business. But oh, my head spins! It releases secret enthusiasm in me!

Félicia is bedridden again. Could she be pregnant again? Jean-Claude is only six months old. She doesn’t deprive herself of anything. In any case, I’m taking care of the child now. He spends more time with me than with her. I soothe and coddle him.

This morning, while I was strolling with him on the veranda, Jean Luze addressed me, somewhat uncomfortably.

“Claire,” he said, “though I am a little ashamed to take advantage of your kindness, I’m going to ask you to take Jean-Claude into your room for a few days. I’m worried about Félicia’s health.”

He wanted to take the crib to my room right away but I stopped him, panic-stricken.

“Give me a minute to make room for him,” I protested, trembling to see him enter my sanctuary unexpectedly.

“Of course,” he answered. “By the way, while we’re on the subject, why do you lock your door?”

The minute he left, I ran to put my treasures in a safe place. I hid the doll as best I could in the wardrobe, made sure that my books were back under the bed, and opened my door, shivering as if I personally were about to be violated.

Jean-Claude has been my guest for several days now. I wake up at night to change and rock him to sleep. This hot, living little body against me. I’m happy to see him soil his diapers, empty his bottle, whimper for more. The smell of talcum powder and milk, it all makes Félicia ill. She kisses her son and throws up. She is definitely allergic to her condition. Jean Luze lives in my room. Blessed be this new pregnancy, this new pregnancy that tortures her. May she give birth ten, twenty times more so that she will give him to me. I will be nanny to all these children. I will work myself to death for them as long as their father is somewhat mine. He’s rolling around on my bed playing with his son, he’s resting on my bed. On my sheets he leaves behind the smell of a man’s body, of tobacco, of clean rough sweat. I deeply inhale the pillow where his head was resting; I kiss his son where he kissed him. I bask in my good fortune. He often returns from work with groceries, holding them out to me as if I were his wife. His eyes rest on me and he pinches my cheek to thank me, probably for taking such good care of Jean-Claude. I run to the pantry to get him that steaming cup of black coffee he loves above all things.

“You,” he says to me, “are a pearl among women.”

It’s been a month since I added anything to my journal. I have had neither the time nor the desire. My life is so full! I have a son and a man. My door is open all day long to Jean Luze. Why would I need an outlet? I live fully.

***

Félicia is four months along and her morning sickness is getting worse instead of better. She is wasting away even as her belly grows larger. Her cadaverous appearance is hard to look at. Dr. Audier gives her daily injections because she throws up the little she eats. She kicked out Jean Luze from their room the other day because she claimed he smelled of tobacco. Is she also allergic to love? Abstinence will make him easy prey.

Annette comes to the house almost every day. She is splendid in her maternity blouse. Triumphant, she continues to torture Félicia.

“Poor sweetie,” she cries out, kissing her, “you look so awful! It’s a crime! Your husband shouldn’t get you pregnant!…”

This in the presence of Jean Luze.

With mimicry impossible to reproduce she recounts Eugénie Duclan’s wedding. She imitates the pharmacist’s stiff walk and Eugénie’s childish posturing.

“And she had the gall to wear a crown of orange blossoms in her hair. It just made her look even older. Nothing draws one’s attention like contrast. What a dreadful display! At that age one should have the decency to have a simple wedding.”

Youth is pitiless, and with good reason!

I saw Dora Soubiran fall. She was walking with legs spread apart, a basket on her arm; she stumbled on a stone and fell. I ran down the stairs. I gave her my hand in the middle of the street and walked her home. Calédu happened to go by just then. He stopped. I did not look at him. Eyes glinted behind drawn blinds. Charles Farus stood behind his counter with his eyes wide and his hand over his mouth. Several beggars blocked our way.

“Let us through!” I shouted at them impatiently.

I led Dora inside her house and we stayed there a long time stirring up old memories.

“Watch out for the commandant,” she whispered suddenly, “watch out for him.”

“I will come back every day,” I replied firmly.

“Watch out for him,” she repeated.

Suddenly she began to shiver as if she were cold.

“With each blow, he would yell: ‘snobs, you bunch of snobs, mulatto snobs, I’ll make cripples of all of you, you snobs…’”

She hid her face in her hands and sobbed.

“He hates us! Claire, he hates us!”

The cause of this hatred is beyond her: she has never understood much about politics and her suffering is of the most useless, most unfair variety that Calédu has ever inflicted on anyone.

The whispers from behind the blinds followed me home. Why was I afraid? And how little effort it takes to be rid of that feeling!

“Do you remember,” she said to me the next day, “our wonderful evenings together in the old days, back in those beautiful days? We would eat what we liked, weren’t afraid of anyone, and we were happy.” (She lowered her voice.) “He may have crippled me but my soul has no master save the Lord, the Lord alone.”

Her stubbornness made me smile.

“I won’t hang my head before him either anymore,” I promised.

“They’re constantly spying on me, Claire!” she continued. “Night and day, they’re tapping on my door, it’s unbearable! They’re watching me as if I were a ringleader. Look…”

She opened the doors to the backyard: behind the fence beggars standing on tiptoe were trying to figure out what was going on inside her house.

“They’re all armed,” she whispers. “I’m going to flee to Port-au-Prince. I have already written to friends and told them everything.”

“To whom did you entrust your letter?”

“To Madame Camuse. She promised to get someone reliable to deliver it for me.”

The beggars posted in the street followed me to my door with their eyes. Two of them even escorted me. Was it out of weakness or fear that I opened my bag and gave them money?

Can it be that I am the most cowardly of all the women here?

***

Somewhere in the sky there is a ring of stars. I can’t sleep. Intense and mysterious is the night! It resembles my inner life. A few stars play hide-and-seek. I see them run and chase each other in a corner of the sky. A luminous dot under the trees on the street awakens my curiosity. Someone is still there smoking and walking alone. I recognize Calédu’s silhouette. He can’t sleep either. I feel like running up to him to dig my nails into his eyes and drag him blind and bleeding along Grand-rue.

I look after Félicia like a mother. I kneel down to make her drink her soup. I am at her feet…

I always thought that one would become generous if one became rich by chance, but I’ve learned that plain happiness can make you good as well. Everyone has his own idea of happiness. Suffering has made me modest, so for now I am content with life’s charity. I even tremble at the thought of getting too ambitious, for fear of spoiling everything. Félicia’s presence is so negligible that it doesn’t bother me. I treat her like a sick child. How could I be jealous of this wretch? I am Jean-Claude’s mother, really, just as I am Jean Luze’s wife. This idea brings me so much joy that I would like to share it. I would like to play the Beethoven concerto at full volume. I want to set the house ablaze with music. Félicia impatiently asks me to lower the volume; the concerto annoys her. This brings me back to earth. She does exist. She is between us. Right now, she is listening to Gisèle Audier’s gossip. The woman chatters like a magpie.

“Me, my dear,” she says, “I am against all these women who disregard the prescribed laws of society and claim to be independent. Lately, it seems like anything goes, it’s disgusting. In the old days, it wasn’t like that. We’ve let our youth off the leash. They’ve become depraved. I would never name names but I know of very young girls who won’t say no to anything. You’ve probably found out by now what kind of life Jane Bavière leads. It’s appalling. She entertains men after nightfall. Many have been seen going there. Who are they? We don’t know that yet. No one has recognized them. They come at night and knock on her door. Eugénie Duclan saw them one evening. So has Madame Camuse. Maybe she invites the prefect, and the commandant. She won’t be able to keep her secret for long. The entire neighborhood is watching her. Oh! But we’ll learn their names soon enough! It’s just like what happened with the Grandupré girl. You know, I was the first to see that she was sneaking into Old Mathurin’s house, the old pervert. I told the whole neighborhood and Madame Grandupré beat Agnès until there was blood.”

My God! How I would like the right to slap her to make her keep her mouth shut! And how mean they are, despite everything that’s happened…

It was barely five in the morning and Jean-Claude woke earlier than usual and was crying in his crib, when there was a knock at my door.

I opened up and Jean Luze came in.

“Why is he crying?” he asked me. “Is he sick?”

“Our little gentleman has probably soiled himself and wants to be changed.”

He leaned over the crib at the same moment I did and our heads touched.

He smiled and lifted his face to look at me.

“Settle down your son,” he said.

“My son!”

My emphasis must have struck him because he quickly straightened.

“Isn’t he? Claire, isn’t he?”

He must have been affected by my loosened hair, the neckline of my dressing gown revealing my cleavage, because he exclaimed as if he were seeing me for the first time:

“You look awfully good like this!”

I was busy changing Jean-Claude.

“You look awfully good like this!” he repeated. “You must have been a splendid girl, and I wonder why you didn’t make a life for yourself. Dr. Audier mentioned those complexes, but I’m still skeptical. Perhaps you were disappointed in love. It’s none of my business,” he went on despite my silence, “but I think you have everything it takes to make a man happy. Claire! Are you listening to me?” He took Jean-Claude in his arms and fell on my bed:

“That godmother of yours, she never answers your question,” he added. “That’s how she discourages nosy people.”

Barefoot, in pajamas and on my bed, he unsettled me so much that I could barely look at him. I went to the kitchen to look for the child’s bottle and when I came back I found him smoking and thinking, lying beside the baby.

“Are you so unhappy with your lot?” he asked me.

“Why do you ask me that?”

“You look a little desperate sometimes…”

“Me!”

“Yes, you. And now you’ve fallen into the habit of sacrificing yourself, and people take advantage. It’s not fair…”

I bristle at his pity and interrupt him.

“All of that doesn’t matter.”

“But of course it does.”

He put his hands on my shoulders in a friendly and affectionate way.

“You have a hard time accepting things, Claire,” he went on, “and you live in a state of perpetual revolt. You’ll end up miserable all your life, like me. I’d like to help.”

“You!…”

The word came out of my mouth like a scream.

He dragged a few puffs from his cigarette without looking at me.

“You are like me,” he added, “I see it more and more every day. I happen to know the reason for those lines in your forehead. You have to forget Calédu, you must calm your sense of outrage. Do you know what happens to people like us? Do you know what they can expect?”

And in a halting voice, as if he was pulling the words out of himself, he said:

“I was only eighteen when I went to fight against the Germans. My father died the year before and I left my mother and sister back home. We were poor; they needed me. I only had one desire: to kill Germans and avenge us. I left and was dispatched to the trenches, into the thick of the fighting. A cold rage kept me going and I slaughtered Germans at point-blank range. I kept track of how many in a notebook, and in four years I killed about fifty. I was gravely wounded and sent to the hospital clutching my own guts, dying. Back home, I learned that my sister and my mother were both dead, and I found work far away from my country, seeking in vain to forget and to heal my soul. I had done what everyone calls my duty, but to this day I am still convinced that the war robbed me of my mother and my sister, who both died of anguish and poverty…”

“There won’t be another war,” I said.

“So I guess you don’t keep up with what’s going on in the world, my dear Claire!” he replied. “If my country ever fights Germany again I know that I will give up my wife and son. Nothing could stop me from leaving, nothing.”

He remained quiet for a while, then, throwing his cigarette out the window, he seemed to make a visible effort to control his emotions.

“Well, let’s set aside that wretched conversation and take care of this little cherub. As they say so well here, God is good, and there will be no war.”

He tried to feed Jean-Claude. Two little hands greedily closed around his.

“My little guy! My little guy!” he said, happy.

They belong so much to me that I feel like crying with joy No one will ever take them from me.

Sentiment rules the world. Cynics swear otherwise until one day it finally catches them. We are all in search of that “grain of sand” that will reconcile us with ourselves. Even those who are jaded end up dragging their boredom all over the world in the same hope. I have even forgotten about Calédu and his people. Jean-Claude and his father are healing me. I have recklessly broken the dikes. I’ve cupped a hand over my own “grain of sand.” I have transferred to these two beings all the love that was in my heart. Hatred has left me. I keep out everything that could distract me from this wonderful feeling.

Yesterday while Annette was there, Jean Luze needed a book in order to discuss it at greater length with Joël Marti. He looked for it in the library to no avail and called me over to ask about it.

“I can’t find that History of Religions I left here.”

“That book is in my room,” I felt obliged to admit.

“In your room?” he said, surprised. “Are you reading it?”

“I’m rereading it.”

He looked at me skeptically.

“No.”

“You’re surprised I read-do you think I’m an idiot?”

My tone was so bitter for once that he looked at me as if he didn’t know me.

“Here’s your book,” I said, giving it to him. “In one piece.”

“Come now, Claire. It’s not a reproach.”

There was so much gentleness in his voice and eyes that I felt ashamed I was so defensive.

He held me by the shoulder and leaned in to give me a friendly kiss, but I quickly pushed him away.

“What a chip on your shoulder!” he said, and pinched my cheek.

“Nice, Claire,” Annette cried out with a burst of laughter. “You play mommy to his son and wifey with him!…”

Fortunately, she didn’t see the look of hatred I gave her. No, you imbecile, I’m not playing. I am mother and wife in everything but name. Might you be jealous of me for once? You took the ground out from under me once without my being able to say even a word in self-defense. I pushed you into Jean Luze’s arms on purpose only to test my power. He will never love you. Do you get it? Never. Keep telling yourself that my role seems merely secondary. I exist only for him, anyone can see that. Or would you like me to prove it to you by making advances to him too? I am still superior to you in that respect. Our intimacy often invites me into scenarios worthy of you, but I decline. I don’t wish to seduce him like some manipulative sex kitten. I want more than his body. I am demanding and picky. I know that certain kinds of conduct would be unforgivable in a woman my age. At forty you can persevere, but it’s too late to make your debut. At least, that’s true more or less. I know this and I am patiently biding my time.

Honesty is a truly difficult thing to learn! Besides, where does honesty begin and where does it end? In obvious bad faith, I refuse to see myself clearly. Certain thoughts, once born, are to be regretted as much as certain words. Sometimes, in my feverishly imagined love scenes, I get panic attacks. This panic is often triggered by the sudden memory of my father, who is whipping me with his belt. If Jean Luze were to burst into my room just then and take me in his arms, I would struggle, cry out and defend myself as if my life were threatened. Do I just like the idea of love? Have I not willingly chosen this unreal situation because I feel unable to go all the way? This is my challenge. I am going to belong to Jean Luze. He alone can help me. I have to know what I am made of.

More and more I have the feeling that my imaginary affair with Jean Luze is an ersatz substitute I have chosen on purpose because of its power and corrosiveness. How much longer will I be able to fool myself?

He’s mine, this kid I didn’t carry in my womb! I have made his first pants. He crawls around on all fours and stands with some help. He has eight teeth that came in without too much trouble. He is a stout little guy, very lively, and welcomes his father by holding his arms out to him. Although I keep whispering it to him, he hasn’t managed to say “mama” yet. I want to be the first he calls by that name. His presence in my room seems to soothe my feelings. His innocence is so disarming and his purity so contagious that I even feel shame when I am naked in front of him. That is why yesterday I burned everything that reminded me of the past, the doll, the pornographic postcards, etc. I am done with these old substitutes. I am nothing but mother and wife. I have moved up a notch.

“Call Jean for me,” Félicia sometimes asks. “I am so sick I don’t have the strength to love him.”

Without jealousy I watch him sit beside her and kiss her hand or stroke her hair. I have never caught him touching her as if he were in love with her. Despite himself, he treats her like a sick child. He pities her, not me.

“It’s the pregnancy,” he says to comfort her, “you have to wait a bit. It will be over soon. You’re already four months along…”

Such tenderness!

“Jean is nothing but an ethereal being,” Annette told me yesterday. “I bet he’s a shabby lover. I would definitely cheat on him if I were his wife. And I am grateful that life has worked out the way it has.”

I don’t believe a word of what Mme Audier and Father Paul say about Jane. Even though Félicia frowns on it, I visit her and Dora regularly. Dora and those crazed eyes of hers! Jane, stooping over her sewing machine, working late into the night, and seeing no one but me! I will never abandon them again. Jane’s son often talks to Pierrilus, the one-armed beggar who sleeps under our veranda, the only one beaten by Calédu for complaining-he dared ask for his wages-but probably not the only one to hate him for his smug indifference to their plight. Does he think it’s enough to arm them against us, is he so stupid as to believe this will comfort them as they starve?…

Félicia keeps getting worse. She is skin and bones. I forbid myself to think of her death; but she looks too much like a woman condemned. How often I have done away with her in my mind! I did so to give flight to my dreams, to stuff myself with illusions. What perfect crimes, what unmitigated betrayals we store up in ourselves! Only deep within do we have the courage to really live, and that’s a good thing. I am the one who dresses Félicia, the one who feeds her. She has been handed over to her worst enemy. Today, Félicia threw up her soup. She can’t keep anything down. Jean Luze came home just as she suffered a mild fainting spell, during the course of which she lost blood. Jean Luze left to get Audier and came back alone.

“What do we do?” he asks. “Audier’s not home.”

Félicia is pale as a corpse. Jean Luze is kneeling by her. He calls her name, then runs off again. Félicia seizes on this as an opportunity to faint again. I rush to the medicine cabinet to get a bottle of alcohol. I return to find Félicia moaning. Where is Jean Luze? I don’t want to be alone with her. Finally, the door opens and Jean Luze walks in with Dr. Audier.

He leans over Félicia to examine her.

“Do you recognize me?” he asks.

She opens her eyes and nods.

The examination is unpleasant, even painful. Dr. Audier takes Jean Luze aside and says to him:

“I recommend a few injections to give her enough strength to withstand an abortion.”

“An abortion!”

“It’s better that way, trust me. Your wife has a fibroma and has lost a lot of blood…”

“I’m putting her in your hands,” Jean Luze answered, completely unstrung, “or maybe it would be better if I left for Port-au-Prince with her? Your hospital is so poorly equipped, and I don’t want to reproach myself should anything go wrong.”

“The sooner the better,” Dr. Audier advises, only too happy to get rid of a new victim.

He hands a prescription to Jean Luze and turns to me:

“Pack your bags, Claire,” he tells me. “Félicia must get to Port-au-Prince without wasting any time and you must go also because of the baby.”

The cigarette was getting restive in the corner of his wet lips.

Without responding, I took the bags from the closet and filled them and ran to Jane’s house to let her know of our departure.

Félicia has been at the Saint-François-de-Sales Hospital since last evening. The car ride took eight hours. I watched Jean Luze clutching the wheel as he avoided the potholes; I listened to him swear at the state of the road; and I silently wiped Félicia’s clammy brow as she rested her head on my lap, saying to myself:

Might she be wise enough to drop dead without my help?

Now, with Jean Luze in my arms and my eyes on the operating room door, I wait. Jean Luze is in such anguish he can’t keep still. I am convinced my love will make him forget Félicia quickly. In the meantime, his distracted look seems to cancel us out, his son and me.

The door finally opens and the surgeon appears. Jean Luze rushes to meet him.

“It went very well,” he says. “She’ll pull through. I’ll be back later this evening.”

“Claire!” Jean Luze cries with a sigh of relief, “we can finally rest easy!”

I have to get used to this thought, I have to get used to the suffering it means for me if I don’t want to be crushed by it: Félicia is going to get better and we will return home and she will take back her place beside her husband, beside her child.

Here I am in a hotel room, making the most of this slight respite life has given me. I have no curiosity about this city that I haven’t seen in so long. In other words, I cling to my idée fixe, I hold on to my obsession, I remain indifferent to the tumultuous buzzing of cars and to the bustle inside the hotel. Soon I will be alone again. Won’t my past come to the rescue? Where are my old unhealthy habits? Where are the objects with which I fooled myself and that I was careless enough to destroy? My hands are empty, emptier than before. I am alone with my fear, alone with my suffering that stands there ready to spring and finish me off. Would I have the courage to kill Félicia? Ah! These long sleepless nights when even the air you breathe resounds with a life of its own, when each hour falls on the heart like a tolling bell! How these nights have furrowed my face and aged me!

Félicia is definitely better. She doesn’t need me. Jean Luze watches over her like a nurse by her bedside day and night. The red roses he gave her bloom on her table. She is beautiful in her blue silk shirt. Who tied that ribbon round her hair?

“Claire,” she says in a soft distant voice, “I’d like to hold my child.”

I hand her son to her.

A debilitating defeat. I no longer have the strength to delude myself. I know that for him I am an able and devoted sister-in-law who runs his household and whom he rewards once in a while by confiding in me or with a modest gift. He has never thought of me as a woman. This fact tortures me. I would perform heroic feats if it got his attention. Wouldn’t it be heroic to throw myself at him and confess my love?…

We are about to go home. The suitcases are packed and I am waiting for the Luzes by the hotel entrance with Jean-Claude in my arms. The days to come will be agony! I will see them kissing, caressing each other, living together in their room. They will make me a witness to their love, they will share their plans with me, convinced they are making me happy when I am in torment. How will I bear this without falling apart?

Jean Luze, I was telling myself, do you have any idea what I am capable of? Do you know what kind of a monster this starving being can become when its hunger is so sorely tempted but left unquenched? You have been most reckless with me. You have given me a son and you are now taking him back after shutting the doors of your love in advance. For you didn’t let me do or say anything. Wretch! You’re the one who’ll be my scapegoat. Do you understand? Your indifference will be a springboard for that sterile rebellion of which you yourself have spoken. That’s the easiest explanation for my distress. You will relieve my conscience of the hard truths that assail my mind. Self-discontent, that is the venom that feeds malice.

Félicia is recovering very slowly from the exhaustion of that awful trip and I myself feel rather bruised from the lurching and the weight of my sister and her son lying on top of me. Jean Luze is right. I have sacrificed too much. I am going to think about myself a little more and make a final decision about my future. My glance is more evasive than usual. I am afraid someone will see my disordered thoughts. I take care not to reveal anything. Am I going to wear this stifling mask until the end of my life?

We’re home again! It wasn’t hard to leave behind those petty memories back in my hotel room and at the hospital. Our little town has been shaken by the disappearance of Jane and her child. What’s happened to them? Nobody knows. I curse that trip to Port-au-Prince. If I had been here, things would have happened otherwise. This is the last time Calédu attacks one of my friends. What will happen to Jane and her child? Some people say they saw them passing through around midnight escorted by the armed beggars. Joël and Jean Luze whisper mysteriously to each other and seem to hide something from me. Are they working together to get rid of Calédu? Was Jane helping them? And the men who were seen going into her house, were they Joël and his friends? Three questions I am as yet unable to answer. But I am sure of one thing: the commandant only arrested Jane so that I might throw myself at his feet and beg for mercy. I would rather see Jane and her son die. I would rather die myself.

I’m listening to the screams. Are they coming from Jane and her child? I clench my fists and gnash my teeth. A kind of mysterious tremor stirs the town like the hushed sound of a wing slowly gliding over our heads. This shudder that courses through me cannot be merely personal, I know this now. Like me, all of them must be secretly working to free themselves from the constricting fear. I am not alone. All of them are here around me, and we suffer together, minds fixed on our impending deliverance.

Félicia is spoiling herself. The fate of Jane and her son scarcely seems to move her, since she has taken shelter so completely in Jean Luze’s love. She has everything and I have nothing. I don’t think I envy her, however. Envy is not enough to explain the dreadful hatred I feel for her. This woman is my enemy. She has placed herself in my way, she has blocked my horizons, she has thwarted my destiny, stolen my happiness as Annette did seven years ago. But this time I have decided to defend myself. With Félicia gone, I am sure Jean Luze would be mine more than he is now hers. I would destroy in him the very memory of the past. When you overestimate yourself, you are lying to yourself out of loyalty. All because you are aware you’re being duped. You draw strength and courage from your false idea of yourself. What terrible disappointment awaits me behind this veil of lies? Could I gather the shattered bits of my old self? I live the life of an unsung lover. I believe I am more ardent than Messalina, more seasoned than Cleopatra, more romantic than Emma Bovary. [26] And I want Jean Luze to prove it to me. I am approaching narcissism. My abnormality repels me. I see it as a defect.

Tonight I will bring him to my room and confess my love. He must reveal me to myself.

I couldn’t take the first step. Twenty times I left my room to go to him, all in vain. I could never do it. Making advances is beyond me.

***

Being alone scares me right now. Here I am, like a poisoned rat [27] in the house. Jean Luze is now in the habit of going out alone with his son. He goes and sits in our little town square and stays there a long while, holding him. Now I have hours of free time. I even avoid going to the kitchen. Nothing matters except this bitterness consuming me, simmering on a low flame. It’s dangerous. The thought of the crime haunts me. It alternates strangely with the outrage that engulfs me when I think of Jane and her son.

I’ve been spending too much time stroking the dagger Jean Luze gave me. In monstrous daydreams, I see myself plunging it into Félicia’s breast without hesitation.

Today, Jean Luze filled his wife’s room with flowers. They don’t need me anymore and unconsciously make me feel it. Here they are, all three of them in their own little world. The Luze family no longer wants an interloper around.

“We have imposed upon you far too much,” Jean Luze told me. “You should take it easy now.”

Félicia looks good thin. She looks like a child with that ribbon in her hair. There really is something disarming about her, both childish and serious. I caught her crying the other day, head buried in Jean Luze’s shoulder.

What is it that’s bothering her? Is she afraid for him? It’s true that he’s become too involved, that he opens his heart too much to his friends. They came back last night and stayed up until eleven, whispering in the living room. Now Jean Luze is infected. He’s become as much an armchair politician as we are. He, too, had better watch out that his words are not repeated lest Calédu take offense! Pierrilus never leaves Jane’s door. Could I be mistaken? I believe I saw Joël and Jean Luze speaking to him through the picket fence.

I have too much free time and my imagination wanders out of bounds. I explore every nook and cranny of my mind. What a terrible swarm of shapeless larvae! When the larvae become thoughts, they are born monstrous. My head is bursting. I am looking for a thousand pretexts to sneak into their quarters. I seek suffering. It alone can wrest me from this act I have not yet dared to commit. And yet I am in something close to a paroxysm of suffering. Can it get any worse without crushing me?

“Go to your godmother for a minute,” Félicia says, handing me her son.

I carry him under the trees, my eyes fixed and mortified, refusing to kiss him, surprised at my hostility toward him. I struggle against terrible temptation, but I feel like I am moving under the whip into the incandescent flames of a diabolical world. I am prey to insomnia again. I feel lost, as if stranded in the center of the earth. I toss in bed, blood rushing to my temples, throat dry. My life goes by as uselessly as ever. The thankless chores of an old maid disgust me. Supporting roles are no longer enough for me. The taste of victory has left its mark on me. I have held happiness. I know every line in its face. I cry rolled up in a ball. I feel tiny, shriveled up by pain. I cling to the crime as if it were a buoy. It alone can save me. I struggle, but it has me in its claws. I know I will yield in the end; I am caught in a spiral, committed body and soul in a merciless contest. I mask the struggle. I am like an animal on a leash with its head turned away from the route it must follow.

There is a knock at my door and Jean Luze comes in.

“Don’t stay in the dark,” he tells me. “It will make you more depressed. I realize that you are worried about Jane and her son. I realize this…”

I turn on the light without responding.

“You know, Claire, I have made a decision,” he continues. “We are leaving soon and I’m taking Joël with me. I haven’t been able to do much for all of you until now, unfortunately. But I will at least save this young man by getting him out of here. What about you, do you want to come with us? I mean it.”

“No, thank you,” I answer.

He nervously dug his fingers through his hair and lit a cigarette:

“You really don’t want to?”

“No, thank you,” I repeated.

“I am sorry to hear that, Claire. We’ll think of you often and your godson will learn to love you from afar. I’m really sorry you don’t want to come along…”

To hear that conventional little sentence in his mouth! Anger, resentment, outrage, rumble within me. He gives my arm a friendly squeeze and leaves.

I see the Audiers’ cat prowling around our house. He brushes against the wall with his tail in the air, his hypocritical gaze half concealed by his blinking eyelids. He has gray fur like an old man. His meowing has often woken me up at night. He is Augustine’s worst enemy, often stealing food whenever she is the least bit careless. I have an idea. I will use him as practice. I will kill him to see what happens, to know what it feels like, how much strength one needs to get it right.

Joël is alone with Jean Luze.

They are listening to music in the living room. I hear them talking in hushed voices. There is a quiet knocking at the door of the dining room and I see Joël run to it. He invites Pierrilus, the one-armed beggar, to come in, and takes a package from him that he conceals when he notices me.

“Careful!” Jean Luze cries.

Doesn’t he trust me anymore? I feel so humiliated it seems to me I no longer exist. He looks through us. He doesn’t see us anymore, except when we interrupt his interminable discussions. He looks at us in a cold, impenetrable, and disconcerting way. With utmost silence, I put down the bottle of rum and glasses he asked for. Félicia never dares to interrupt him. Finally, she suffers, she too! She has become a harmless rival. As affectionate as he is with her, as solicitous as he is, I know now that he never loved her.

In any case, her death will push him to me. I can only master him through grief. With her gone, I will once again be mother to his son. There will be intimacy between us again.

Here I am sitting in bed, dagger in hand. I contemplate and caress it. Its tip is sharp and its finely chiseled handle is slightly curved. Where does this weapon come from? What is its history? The main thing is whether or not it can kill someone with a single blow. Will I have to witness some drawn-out agony if I miss? Will I have the courage to strike several times to make sure the deed is done? I have considered everything. I will leave nothing to chance. The Audiers’ cat will be my guinea pig. I will plunge the dagger in his back as practice. I don’t want Jean Luze to have to worry about anything. Suspicion will initially fall on him. I will stage things so that the police shift their investigation and conclude that it was suicide. Invoking her upcoming departure, I will ask Félicia to inscribe a moving note on the bottom of that family photo taken on the day of Jean-Claude’s baptism, something along these lines: “Adieu, Claire, I leave you here with everything I love.” The police will not see through this because their plate is full: the police only care about politics.

After killing Félicia, I will put the dagger in her hand. They will say: “She committed suicide because she couldn’t bear to leave the country, poor Madame Luze!”

The cat is dead. I followed it, lured it with fresh fish, raised my hand high and struck. From my window, I look upon its dead body. It collapsed in the yard beneath my window. Its legs are already stiff. Its lips, curled in an awful grin, reveal sharp white teeth. “Good riddance!” Augustine will exclaim when she sees it. And Mme Audier will mourn it in good form, lamenting the demise of this sly and deceitful animal she never thought to feed in its lifetime.

Before it dropped dead, the cat looked at me. This is what I can’t forget: its eyes. Pathetic! A cat! Nothing but a cat! And yet I’m gnawed by remorse. Is it because in my eyes it was innocent?

The thought of crime haunts me. It is eating away at me. I feel as weak as a convalescent. What am I waiting for? Sleep has fled from me. I think of Jane. I think about her little one and I want to scream.

I am ready; Félicia is alone in her room. I am going to go in. In the meantime, I practice killing her in my head.

My teeth chatter. I bite my fist. I’m nauseous, sick to my stomach. My mind is blank. No, no! I mustn’t admit that I will never have the courage to kill Félicia. I will die instead of her. It is time for me to put an end to these desperate struggles. I’m burning up. Is it fever? So much the better! Come, delirium. It will give me a taste of death in life. I am used to burying myself all on my own. These plunges into the void are comforting. I hope they will spare me from reality’s torments. Thanks to them, I’ve become familiar with the idea of death. It doesn’t frighten me. I have my very own coat of mail, my own shell and insulation: my imagination.

Blood hammers my temples. Hammer blows raining on metal, my head bursts, blood runs down my face. There is some on my sheets, my shirt, on the floor, everywhere. No, it’s not true. I’m the one seeing red. From anger. I’m angry with myself. I overestimated myself and seeing my cowardice makes me sick.

I am nothing but a heap of mutilated flesh. I’m the one dying, murdered. The dagger buried somewhere in my body. I don’t know where exactly. Ah! The hemorrhage of despair! Oh, to disappear! If only I could disappear without leaving a trace. It’s impossible. One doesn’t disappear that way. I exist. I am free, face-to-face with myself. I must act and this time I must not fail. Will I be up to it? Yes. My pride is intact. It will back me. The moon smiling in the sky scoffs at me. Its serenity reminds me of Félicia’s. Flashes from the past! The long and tedious unreeling of the sad film of my life…

Contradictory feelings claw at each other within me. I am seething with them. My heart is in shreds. What can be done without passion? The lukewarm are like reptiles: they crawl on all fours or drag themselves about. I don’t envy them. I’d rather croak standing. Who says suicide is an act of cowardice? That’s just an easy excuse to resign ourselves to living with our disgust, filthy puppets that we are with a hole in our stomachs to be filled three times a day! At last, like some vigilante, I’ve accosted life. I imagine grabbing it by the collar. I am deciding my own fate. I juggle my own existence! I’m drunk! I clench my fist tightly. And there it is, life, trapped in there. How easy it was to vanquish! I was the stronger one. Oh, I feel like laughing! Life is nothing. We can deal with it as one power deals with another. It’s just that our weapons are not comparable. Life dug a gaping hole beneath our feet to frighten us. Life bent us under a degrading dictatorship. With every step we bump up against the points of its bayonets. Life keeps stabbing us in the back. I am going to settle the score with it once and for all. I am sick of hanging my head and trembling. I look at my furrowed face in the mirror. I discover, to my surprise, that my face is asymmetrical: left profile, dreamy and sweet; right profile, fierce and sensual. Is this me or is this how I see myself? My hands also suddenly seem dissimilar, the one made for action seems thicker, heavier. Why this taste of venom in my mouth?…

Granting myself a final and supreme bit of vanity, I’ve put on my nicest nightgown, untied my hair and got in bed. Everything has to be perfect, it’s a point of honor. I feel wrapped in cool air. Am I hesitating? Ah! Cowardice, how full your disguises! The dagger is in my hand. I am preparing for death. The rough touch of my sheets is gone. I am gliding in silk. So sublime. Can this be me walking ecstatically, draped in crimson, toward that strange land of shadows? The fever is rising. Now I am buried in a shroud of flowers. I am spewing mist. I’m pierced by the freezing air. I am an iceberg pushed by the wind across the vast expanses of the sea. In the end this bitch of a life is not such a bitch when the heart has even the slightest reason to hope. Yes, but what about me, do I have some reason to hope?

I lift the weapon to my left breast, when the cries of a riotous mob shake me out of my delirium. Stretching out my arm with the drawn dagger, I listen. Where are these cries coming from? Now my attention is turned away from its goal. Life, death, do they depend on chance? I hide the dagger in my blouse and I come down. There are so many beggars that their stench overpowers me. The street is lit by the peasants’ torches. They are hollering, “Down with Mister Long,” and walking toward the American. He immediately aims a submachine gun: twenty fall. Calédu and his officers rush to the police station. They apparently intend to reestablish order by shooting in the air. I have the impression a bullet came from Jane’s house. Pierrilus draws his gun from his rags and aims at Calédu, and others do the same: three policemen fall to the ground. The bullets whizz by me, coming, I am now sure, from Jane’s balcony: I recognize Joël and Jean lying low behind the balusters. Uniforms are strewn on the ground. The commandant retreats as he fires. He is afraid, alone in the dark, hounded by the beggars he himself armed. He is moving backward toward my house. Does he realize that? Behind the blinds of the living room, I watch and wait for him.

I take my dagger from my blouse and open the door partway. He is on my veranda. I see him hesitate and turn his head in every direction. He is within reach. With extraordinary strength, I plunge the dagger into his back once, twice, three times. The blood spurts. He turns around, gripping the door, and looks at me. Is he going to die here, under my own roof? I see him stagger away and fall stretched out in the street, right in the middle of the gutter. The beggars, led by Pierrilus, fling themselves on his body like madmen.

No one has seen me, except perhaps Dora Soubiran, whose house is so close to mine. I cautiously close the dining room door. I hear Jean-Claude crying and Félicia talking. The wild cries of the beggars grow more intense. Behind the blinds glow hundreds of anguished eyes.

Jean Luze appears with a smoking gun. I hear Joël Marti holler:

“To the prison! Free the prisoners!”

A vast clamor rises in response.

Jean Luze grabs my hands. One of them still holds the dagger red with blood.

“Like an animal, he died like an animal,” I slowly articulate.

“You killed him? You? So you’re the one who got him? Oh! Claire…”

He squeezes me in his arms, almost smothering me. His cheek against mine, his breath in my ear.

“If you only knew how tired I am!”

Was it I who said these words? Was I the one who gently, very gently, pushed him away?

I leave him. He follows me with his eyes without moving. I go in my room and double-lock the door. Here I am on my bed, contemplating this blood on my hands, this blood on my robe, this blood on the dagger…

From the window, I catch a glimpse of the torches wavering in the wind. The doors of the houses are open and the entire town has risen.

<a l:href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Tonton Mathurin: Tontón is a Creole world for uncle (trans.).
<a l:href="#_ftnref1">[2]</a>houpland: tunic with a long skirt (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a>griffe: dark-skinned mixed-race person.
<a l:href="#_ftnref3">[4]</a>grimelle: mixed-race person with light skin and nappy hair.
<a l:href="#_ftnref3">[5]</a>clairin: alcohol made with sugarcane; similar to rum but less refined (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref6">[6]</a>has: voodoo gods.
<a l:href="#_ftnref7">[7]</a>petit-blanc: a white Creole too poor to own a large plantation.
<a l:href="#_ftnref8">[8]</a> “you found yourself a woman, business is good!”: In the original, Mme Potiron uses Creole, “oil joindre femme affaire ou bon!”(trans.).
<a l:href="#_ftnref9">[9]</a> grumpy owls: frisés, which the author footnotes as “owls, female” (trans.).
<a l:href="#_ftnref10">[10]</a>halforts: handmade shoulder bags woven from fan palm fiber (trans.).
<a l:href="#_ftnref11">[11]</a> black hill folk: In the original, the author uses a creolism, “les nègres des mornes,” without italics. Alomes is Creole for “mountains” and, by extension, the hill country (trans.).
<a l:href="#_ftnref12">[12]</a>rastaquouères: flashy foreigners, slick upstarts (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref13">[13]</a> cat’s-tongue tea: a calming herbal tea brewed from borage (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref14">[14]</a> old Grandet: In Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, the miserly father of the heroine (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref15">[15]</a> Antiphelic Milk: skin lotion used to fade freckles, but used here as a skin lightener (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref16">[16]</a> Messalina’s ardor: the Roman empress Messalina, c. 22-48, wife of Claudius and a reputed nymphomaniac (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref17">[17]</a> President Leconte: General Cincinnatus Leconte, president of Haiti from 1911 to 1912 (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref18">[18]</a> “little soldiers”: Petits soldats was the name given to the members of the lower class who made up the Haitian police of the time.
<a l:href="#_ftnref19">[19]</a> Sophie Fichini: the abused heroine of Les Petites Filles modèles, a novel for children published by the Comtesse de Ségur in 1858 (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref20">[20]</a> Tancrède Auguste: president of Haiti, 1912-13 (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref21">[21]</a> Cacos: revolutionaries from the north.
<a l:href="#_ftnref21">[22]</a> Vilbrun Guillaume Sam: Leader of the revolt that brought President Leconte to power, Sam served as president of Haiti briefly in 1915, before his execution of political prisoners led to his murder by an angry mob, which precipitated the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref23">[23]</a> President Dartiguenave’s government: Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave, president of Haiti from 1915 to 1922 (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref23">[24]</a> Marchaterre Massacre: On December 6, 1929, U.S. Marines opened fire on unarmed peasants during a peaceful demonstration (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref25">[25]</a> Salammbô: priestess of ancient Carthage, the title character of an 1862 novel by Gustave Flaubert (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref26">[26]</a> Emma Bovary: central character in Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel Madame Bovary, whose intensely romantic notions lead to her adultery and suicide (trans).
<a l:href="#_ftnref27">[27]</a> poisoned rat: Haitian expression meaning miserable and burning up inside.