Love, Anger, Madness

by Marie Vieux-Chauvet

  ***

  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 o
f 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.