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 liv
es 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.
A
nd 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!
Love, Anger, Madness Page 3
