CHAPTER FOUR
As usual, the father returned from work at lunchtime. He brushed his wife’s forehead with a kiss, greeted the others with a wave of his hand and took his seat. At the end of the meal, he looked at his watch and Rose did the same. They got up and went to the door the grandfather had more or less barricaded. At the same time, they heard the noise of a powerful engine as a truck full of men in black uniform entered the property. Twenty men jumped out of the truck and began unspooling a long wire.
“They’ve starting surveying the land,” Rose said in a weak voice.
“Shut this door,” the grandfather yelled.
Paul leaped out of his seat and without a word began to climb the stairs at a run.
“I want to see! I want to see!” the child cried out.
“No,” the grandfather replied. “Let’s go in our room to pray.”
The mother took the child herself and set him down in the old man’s arms.
“Because me, I believe in miracles,” the grandfather said, looking at the mother ostentatiously.
“Prayer impedes despair and thereby frees the soul. Do you know the story of the alcoholic who didn’t know he should have prayed?”
“No,” answered the invalid.
“It’s an interesting story and one worth telling.”
He walked by the mother and her eyes followed him, full of hatred.
Yes, she hated him right now as much as he must have hated her. Why such hatred between them, she sometimes wondered. For what did he reproach her? It could only be her father’s misbehavior. A poor failed artist who had tormented his violin for thirty-five years without ever being able to get a proper note out of it. He had started drinking one night when he had tried in vain to play a Chopin waltz. She had seen him start to cry and then break his bow. That evening, she had waited up for him for a long time only to see him come home staggering.
He drank from despair. He died from despair. How could God, if he existed, hold that against him? And what right did the grandfather have to judge? Maybe she should just see him as a foolish old man and forgive him. At the beginning of her marriage, she had almost loved him. She had come to his house, trembling with emotion, daughter of an alcoholic who died under atrocious circumstances, as everyone knew. He had given her a piercing look and she lowered her head very humbly. His gaze seemed to say: “Don’t think you are honoring us with your presence, mulatto girl. Your father was nothing but a mulatto alcoholic and I went to school with people like him at the Saint-Martial Seminary.” He wasn’t kind, she had soon understood this. He was created in the image of a God of his own senile invention, a God he threw in your face at the worst moment, like blows from a club, savoring every twitch and heartrending cry. At times she could feel his forever-accusing eye, and she had come to understand that there would never be any love between herself and that God. Where was the grandfather’s God? Why hadn’t He already done away with injustice and bloodshed?
She lifted her head and noticed their neighbor on the right, Mme Saint-Hilare, an impotent old mulatto woman who had her chair positioned in front of her window so she wouldn’t miss out on what was going on in their house. If God exists, could it be that He spies on His creatures the way this old woman does? she wondered. She waved to Mme Saint-Hilare, who quickly lowered her head, pretending not to see her. It’s like we have the plague now! she realized, as her heart jumped in her chest. “Necessary trials!” she whispered, imitating the grandfather’s sententiousness. “Sadism!” she added. With that God you only earn your stripes through suffering. And the grandfather used to say that misery awaits those who have known happiness on earth! What could this demanding God want from His creatures? Oh, no! She wanted nothing to do with Him. She dreamed of another God, full of compassion and love, who would have pity on His creatures, would spare the innocent and punish the guilty. In solitude she had learned to pray in her own way, and at times a kind of peace would descend upon her, the sudden and mysterious comfort that comes from the certainty of divine protection.
She went up to check on Paul, who had locked himself in his room, and as she passed by the grandfather’s room she stopped to listen.
“Saints in heaven,” he was reciting.
“Chase away the demons,” the invalid said in response.
“Saints in heaven.”
“Smite the demons.”
Now she could hear their voices reciting the Pater Noster. She knocked on the door to her son’s room. He made her wait before letting her in and greeted her from under his sheets.
“Are you feeling sick?”
“No… why?”
She put her hand on his forehead and felt him burning.
“Yes, you are, you have a fever.”
“Ah… that’s what I thought. My mouth feels ashy.”
He sat up, grabbed the books lying on the bed and held them out to his mother.
“Lie down,” she said.
“No, it’ll pass. I don’t want to stay in bed anymore.”
“Being a little sick isn’t the end of the world,” she answered in a willfully abrupt manner. “Go on, stay in bed. It’s probably the flu.”
He obeyed her, sulking, and she tucked him in and sat beside him.
There was noise in the yard that could be heard through the window. Someone on the other side of the stakes barked out orders that were followed by a whistle blowing and the crackle of bullets. Paul sat up nervously.
“It’s nothing,” the mother said, “stay in bed.”
“Who were they shooting at?”
“At the birds. You know they like killing them.”
She put her hands on his shoulders and forced him back in bed.
“You haven’t been playing soccer lately?”
“No.”
“Where’s Fred? He doesn’t come by to see you anymore?”
“No.”
She had the horrible sensation of a foreign presence in the room. She turned her head toward the window and grew quiet.
“Don’t waste your time,” she continued with effort. “Study on your own until then.”
“Until when?”
“Until things get settled.”
She regretted these last words and lowered her eyes as if she were guilty of something. This nineteen-year-old man was as lucid as she was and it was tactless to treat him like a baby. By doing so she risked losing his friendship, which meant so much to her and which she had done so much to keep alive. She spoiled him in secret, like a wily Apache, slipping him money she had saved through great sacrifice. “Your stingy old man won’t know about it,” she told him with a complicit wink. She often went into his room to confide in him, to talk about the father, about his illicit nightly outings that could only have one purpose. He had protested, not being able to imagine this serious and mournful fifty-year-old man wrapped in a woman’s arms, but then one day he had seen him, suddenly young again, talking to a strange young woman in a car, and he had begun to have his doubts. But out of a kind of masculine solidarity, he had refused to betray him, although he became less affectionate and effusive with him.
“I’ll make you a rum punch,” she said to him.
“With lots of rum, please.”
“With lots of rum,” she acquiesced obediently.
She went downstairs to warm the milk into which she then mixed an egg yolk and some rum. She tasted it and added more rum.
Mélie looked at her without saying anything. The small slanting eyes in her black face glowed with mean-spirited joy.
Why does she also hate me? What have I ever done to her? the mother wondered.
“Madame Louis, your father-in-law told me to make sure no one touches this bottle,” she finally said in a honeyed voice in her drawn-out Creole.
“Why?”
“I don’t know, Madame Louis, but he told me, ‘Mélie, if anyone in this house drinks that rum without my permission, I’ll hold you responsible.’”
“Well, you will have to tell him tha
t Monsieur Paul is ill and needed it.”
“Yes, Madame Louis, I will tell him. Monsieur Paul has the flu?”
“And a fever.”
“You’re right, then. What the grandfather was afraid of is someone drinking the rum for no good reason. He doesn’t like drunkards. That’s what he told me, Madame Louis. I’m going to boil a lemon for Monsieur Paul. But I’ll need money to buy it because I can’t just go pick one anymore… You understand?”
She pointed to the garden.
“Yes,” was all the mother said.
The hammering resounded as she stepped onto the landing. She looked through the window and saw two men nailing a notice to an oak trunk. She went into her son’s room, where she found him sitting and listening, trying to understand the sounds he had heard. He took the cup from his mother’s hand and drank down the scorching punch in one gulp.
CHAPTER FIVE
The mother waited until the house was asleep and cautiously got out of the bed where her husband was sleeping. She threw on a dress and felt her way down the stairs. Outside, the beaming moon promenaded across the sky. Suddenly it was veiled by a cloud and all was plunged in darkness. The mother walked up to the stakes and stopped there. She looked at the notice, white as a tombstone, and read these words: NO ENTRY. She stood there a moment, motionless, staring at the trees, which seemed more massive in the darkness. A light gust of wind shook their branches and an owl hooted, as if awakened from its slumber.
“Who goes there?” a voice shouted.
A gigantic black silhouette rose up.
She involuntarily stepped back as a cry of terror escaped from her lips. She saw him, his eyes full of hatred, laughing silently, and she trembled. He drew his gun and pointed it at her: “Want to do it with me, mulatto girl? Want to do it?” she heard. She raised her hands to the sky and shouted, no, no, and ran back home. A bullet whistled past her ear. She threw herself to the ground and crawled to the kitchen door. As soon as she was safe, she closed her eyes and put both hands to her heart. Her fear and the shortness of her breath made the rattle in her chest unmistakable this time. She remained that way for several minutes, head tilted, listening to her heartbeat; then, opening her eyes again, she found herself at the sideboard, opened it and grabbed the bottle of rum. She took great swigs straight from the bottle and put it back in its place. The father was still sleeping. She went to bed, pulled the sheets over herself, hoping the feeling of the covers would comfort her. She touched the shoulder of the man sleeping beside her, and he grumbled, surly in his slumber. Such loneliness! she thought. In vain she tried to sleep, and dawn found her with her eyes on the ceiling and her arm across her forehead.
At that moment, she heard cautious footsteps brushing along the stairs. The steps were getting closer, halting to the rhythm of a pendulum, and the stairs creaked just as regularly, just as mechanically. She got up and opened her bedroom door: Rose was standing before her disheveled, eyes smeared with tears and shoes in hand.
“Mama! You scared me,” she exclaimed in a hushed voice.
“Where were you?”
“Mama, please. I’m twenty. I’m not a baby anymore. Surely you know that.”
“My God!” the mother said, closing her eyes.
“No need for drama, please. I know what I’m doing. Go, go get some rest,” the young woman added in a whisper.
Her mother left her and returned to her bedroom. The father was awake. She sat on the bed and, hiding her face in her hands:
“Rose spent the night out,” she said without looking at him. He coughed, hoping he had misunderstood, and rubbed his eyes:
“Where was she?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“How should I know?”
“We’ll have to ask her,” he added, weighing his words. “Maybe she was with some friends, at a party. We’ll just have to ask her.”
At eight, Rose was sitting at the table like everyone else, bathed, made up, and so fresh one could swear she had stayed in bed all night.
“In the name of the Father and the Son,” the grandfather began before breaking his bread.
The others, except for the invalid, ate as they watched him do this.
“Oh, by the way,” Rose said in an offhand manner, “I had forgotten to tell you about it earlier, Papa, but I was invited out last night and it was too late by the time I remembered. I didn’t want to wake you and Mama, so I just snuck out.”
“Next time, you’ll let us know beforehand, won’t you?” the father said calmly.
“Of course, Papa.”
He had two new anxious wrinkles between his eyes.
“I have to run. Come on, Rose, we need to see that lawyer this morning.”
They got up and left immediately.
“My father is using his daughter to try to sway the lawyer. It turns out he’s a shrewd strategist,” Paul explained quietly. “There he goes taking Rose down the wrong path.”
“A little respect for your father, my grandson,” the grandfather shouted, interrupting him.
He pulled on his goatee and lowered his voice:
“You can’t lead anyone down the wrong path. A dog is born good or bad and the same thing goes for a human being.”
“In that case, we aren’t responsible for anything,” the young man added in a voice that invited no reply.
“We do bear responsibility for having been chosen as carriers of evil,” the grandfather said, finishing his thought.
“Ah, well, in that case!”
“That’s the law, grandson.”
“The law! What law?”
“Divine law,” said the invalid, having followed every word of the conversation. “Grandfather says God has chosen me to become a hero.”
“If you keep stuffing his head with such ideas, you’ll make him go mad,” the mother reproached him.
Her red eyes had dark circles around them. Her father’s eyes, she’ll end up an alcoholic just like him, because it is written that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God, and fear of Him banishes sin, but she fears nothing in life and life will win, grinding her down just as it did her father until his bitter end.
“Teach your daughter to fear God,” he advised sententiously “even if you don’t fear Him yourself. That’s my advice to you.”
He hadn’t meant to complete his thought out loud and had spoken almost despite himself. He saw her shrug and reply:
“For what could God reproach her?”
“You think she’s so innocent?”
“Yes,” she answered with dignity, “I think she is.”
“God willing, you’re right,” the grandfather replied simply. “God willing, you’re right.”
CHAPTER SIX
… That afternoon, the grandfather had the maid bring the invalid to church. Once he found a seat, he took him on his knees and sent Mélie back to wait on the porch. From his pulpit, the Haitian priest delivered a sermon that displeased him because he spoke of obedience and acceptance not of the laws of heaven but of what passed for law in the kingdom of this world.
“We must learn to submit,” the priest was saying. “We must learn to resign ourselves, for nothing happens on earth without God’s will.”
A few people turned to stare at the grandfather. And for a moment he had the unpleasant feeling that the sermon was directed at him. “Should I, too,” he felt like shouting, “Should I, too, resign myself to having my father’s grave profaned and his bones dug up?” He knew the priest would reply: “Yes, if such be God’s will.” And therefore he had gone astray, for rebellion and vengeance swelled within him. Jesus chased the thieves from the Temple with a whip, and my father imitated him. Was he wrong? he wondered. No, and even when he stuck a knife in the back of that incorrigible thief who had managed to bribe the judges and get the law on his side, he was right that time too. After all, since when did a man, a real man, allow what is his to be taken away against his will? And the grandfather wanted to spit in the faces of all these curs, beg
inning with his own son. He left the church irate, the invalid in his arms. If the Church was on the side of the thieves, he might as well pray at home from now on. And God would in the end understand that the Church had sunk into corruption.
Jacob called out to him just as he was opening his house gate. He would not have stopped but the heavy silence that followed the sound of his name made him turn his head to make sure he had heard right. Jacob was standing in a doorway and gesticulating like an old puppet. The grandfather wondered what this mute commotion was all about. He entrusted the invalid to the maid and went to his neighbor’s. Mme Saint-Hilare craned her head, her features contorted by the effort. She saw Jacob’s door open and the men embrace.
“I’ve been waving to you for the past five days. My old friend, my dear old friend!”
“Yes,” the grandfather replied, “but five days ago you would have come over when you wanted to talk to me.”
“Alas, I haven’t been well. My sciatica. I can barely walk.”
And indeed, he was dragging himself about wearing horrible dust-green slippers on his feet.
“I wanted to send a note with the maid but she refused to take it to your house.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the… the men who set themselves up on your land. She claims that one of her brothers was executed by them.”
Only then did the grandfather realize that his friend sounded as though he had lost his voice. That was especially striking, for Jacob had a stentorian voice that he had never been able to control. Often during their endless card games the grandfather would scold him because he frightened the nervous invalid and sometimes startled him awake during his nap.
“The neighborhood is stunned,” Jacob continued. “The Demarquis don’t dare step outside, and Madame Saint-Hilare has been ill, suffering from shock. In any case, thank God you are all in one piece… Dear friend, I just wanted to give you a piece of advice: play dead, forget about the land. Life is more precious than property. If you are not too afraid to venture out this evening, come by for a card game. I’ll leave my door open. No one will see, no one will know.”
Love, Anger, Madness Page 21
