Love, Anger, Madness

by Marie Vieux-Chauvet

  “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 g
ood 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.”