Love, Anger, Madness

by Marie Vieux-Chauvet

  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 a
dmit 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: