“Indeed, Claire has never liked to talk a lot,” Father Paul agreed.
Mme Camuse’s eyes went from Jean Luze to me.
“Her reserve may be the result of too strict an education,” she said. “I knew Monsieur and Madame Clamont, they were rather stern. Weren’t they, Claire?”
“Yes, indeed…”
“And there is something else,” Dr. Audier slipped in. “Psychological complexes, for example.”
“Complexes!” Jean Luze exclaimed.
“Can you imagine, my friend: for a long time Claire had a complex about not being her sisters’ equal, about not being as white and pink as a lily.”
I quicked turned in the direction of the Trudors. Fortunately, they were at the other end of the living room. I gave Dr. Audier a reproachful look and caught one Jean Luze was giving me. It was so strange and unsettling that I lost my composure and spilled anisette on my skirt.
“You dope!” he hissed at me later when we found ourselves alone. “You big dope, back then you must have been the most beautiful of the three Clamont sisters!”
Oh God, now look at him, just like Mme Camuse, talking about me in the past tense.
How mysterious a human being can seem to the very eyes spying on him. Even the secrets he tells you are at best partial revelations. How can you really know what’s going on inside Jean Luze?
Very reluctantly he agreed to give Annette away at the altar. On the other hand, he was quick to give her that gold bracelet she lusted for and he got two kisses on the cheeks for it. The house bubbles with effervescence. She is getting married tomorrow and the gifts keep flowing. The lace gown, courtesy of M. Trudor, which cost me an arm and a leg, is spread on an armchair in the living room, as is the veil adorned with orange blossoms.
“You’ve put on weight since the baby,” Annette says to Félicia. “You have to try to eat less.”
Jean Luze involuntarily looks at his wife. Does he realize the extent to which she’s lost her looks? Another washed-out white woman like all the others he has known. Annette looks at Félicia sternly, shakes her head, looks Jean Luze straight in the eye, and then walks off with an irresistible and provocative syncopation of her hips. Now there’s a Haitian girl who could tempt a saint. Despite her light golden skin, nothing about her could make anyone confuse her with a white woman.
The next day I strapped Félicia into a corset, which didn’t make her any thinner. We left the baby with Augustine and went to the church.
A pressed and powdered crowd jostled inside. Not exactly the “cream of society” as Mme Camuse would point out, elegant and old-fashioned in her long black dress and the feathered hat she wears only for special occasions. Annette glittered on Jean Luze’s arm. Two maids of honor dressed in pink walked before them. Then came the groom on Félicia’s arm, M. and Mme Trudor, Dr. Audier and his wife, Eugénie with her pharmacist, who was dragging his partially paralyzed leg, the mayor dressed like the prefect in his eternal gray suit and black hat, and others from Port-au-Prince whom we did not know, friends of the Trudors. On my way to church I noticed Jane Bavière standing by her door with her son, and Dora peering through her blinds. The sight of them unnerved me. I had not dared invite either of them, thereby acquiescing to the rules of good society and the established order.
The crush of people at church had prevented me from staring at Jean Luze to my heart’s content. I noticed only his distant and chagrined expression as he walked Annette to the altar. He seemed so miserable that I thought he was jealous.
“Look how furious Jean looks,” Félicia whispered to me. “I had to scold him to make him do this. It bothers him to put himself on display.”
Was she as sure of herself as she seemed?
Back home, as the guests gathered in the living room, champagne flutes in hand, the commandant arrived. He greeted only Annette and Paul Trudor and remained standing, his back to the wall. Our eyes locked. He slowly walked up to me and hissed:
“So our hatred is mutual,” he said to me.
But his expression seemed to belie his words.
I started to tremble while my eyes clung to his lips, his teeth, his hands. I saw him smile, so I turned my back to him abruptly.
Again I found myself across from M. Trudor, who was about to speak, surrounded by guests straining their necks to get a good look at the newlyweds.
If the speech was dismal, fortunately there were too few of us to notice.
Jean Luze made me his partner in crime, winking at me with an amused smile, as if I were colluding with him in witnessing this disaster.
Another sleepless night, thanks to Calédu. I’m angry with myself for having trembled before him. I have no other choice but to curb my hatred if I want to decipher the frightful expression on his face. It took some doing, but I managed to chase him from my thoughts.
How empty the house feels without Annette! You might think you were in a funeral parlor. No more dance music, no more peals of laughter, no more stormy exits. We eat lunch in silence, Jean Luze, Félicia and I. I do the laundry as before, wash Jean-Claude’s bottles and look after Félicia. Am I regaining confidence in myself? To what should I attribute this sudden joie de vivre that has me flinging open the window, drawing deep breaths of the cool morning air into my diaphragm, then closing my eyes and throwing myself across my bed with arms splayed like a cross? So luxurious to lose oneself in a dream-world where one lives only for oneself! Floodgates opened, barriers collapsed, shackles broken, I am now joyfully bounding toward freedom. Just me, face to face with myself, with no one around. Will I die without knowing the firm embrace of a man? There comes a time when virginity seems indecent. Has my upbringing so marked me that it seems out of the question to satisfy my needs in an irregular way?
Annette showed up with Paul eight days after the wedding. We were having lunch. She came in running and kissed us with exclamations of gaiety and joy.
“Félicia, my poor dear! You don’t look so good.”
This is turning into persecution.
Without waiting for Félicia to respond, she rushes to the crib and returns with Jean-Claude, whom she simply woke up.
“Look, Paul darling, he’s so adorable!”
She devoured his cheeks with kisses before finally putting him back on his mother’s lap.
A mad dash to the pantry where she likewise kisses a grumpy Augustine, another mad dash into the living room where a swinging tune soon fills the air. The house is alive again!
“Has anyone here missed me at least?”
She sighs without giving us time to answer:
“Unfortunately, we have to go,” she adds, “some friends are expecting us. Did you see my tan? I live on the beach. Fortunately, this awful old-fashioned paleness is going away…”
She’s gone now. She waves one more time from the car. Her smile cuts dimples in her golden cheeks.
“It’s death here without Mademoiselle Annette,” Augustine suddenly blurts out.
She has dared to say what perhaps all of us were thinking, for habit indeed creates ties and even the most shallow human being leaves behind a void.
Irreproachable as he is toward his wife, the feeling he has for her, is that love? He lacks the spark, the joy the lightheartedness that love brings. Am I fooling myself? I still love him-that is, if love means melting with pleasure at the slightest movement of his hand, if it is unreserved admiration, or sharing common tastes in secret but not daring to give oneself away by speaking of them. How much longer will I be prey to this sterile passion? Am I going to settle for mind games for the rest of my life? I complicate things and, like a masochist, invent a thousand ways to torture myself. Idiot that I am, I did nothing with my youth, when naïveté lends self-confidence. I know too much now to lie to myself without revulsion. I know, for example, that only suffering would lead him to me. How love can make one cruel and sadistic! Am I not just like these torturers? I have suffered too much. It’s time for a truce. I will find it in a different way of life. Platonic
love is a myth. Only freaks can settle for that. My love is full-bodied: it’s a nice mixture of sexual drive and lofty sentiment. Just what is necessary not to frighten the respectable woman I am.
I throw myself on my bed and wrap my arms around Jean Luze. I feel the weight of his body on mine. My dry lips always return me to my solitude. Alas, I am alone, alone. More and more I have come to hate these meager compensations, these proofs of my cowardice. Why aren’t you alone, too, Jean Luze? Why aren’t you free? I banish Félicia from my mind. Now I am really turning into a criminal! I am terrorizing myself. A long scream startles me. Someone is calling for help in the dark. I run to the window. I hear the clatter of weapons and a woman cry out. I imagine my neighbors, ears pricked up, trembling and listening like me, just as I imagine the woman in handcuffs being led away by Calédu. I press myself against the wall and open the window a crack. I can’t hear or see anything anymore. Everything has fallen into a kind of deathly silence. I’m surprised at the trembling of my hands and at my heaving rage. What does this have to do with me? And yet, I had the definite impression that, for a minute, I was prey to a dangerous and unbidden thought, one that I shook off willingly. The thought crosses my mind again in a flash. A flash of lightning flying like a dagger from my head, shining before my eyes like a sign. I hide my face in my hands and try to banish this terrible vision by sinking voluptuously into memories of the past.
Can that be me, the little girl hopping on one foot in the stairwell, with beaming eyes and joy in her heart? How old am I? Six, seven years old. All of that is so far away now. My first memories go back to those days. Before that I don’t exist. Suffering is the revelation that makes you aware of yourself. There must be some extraordinary significance to that age because that was when my parents became strict and suspicious toward me. I was reprimanded for no reason, spitefully watched. My mother put sewing work in my hands, and I spent most of my time sitting on a low chair at her feet. Every day my father called for me in a gruff voice to make me repeat my lessons, and pinched my ear hard enough to draw blood for the smallest error. “It clears the mind,” he would say to reassure me about his meanness.
To toughen me and perhaps to punish me for his disappointed paternal hopes, he decided to raise me as if I were a boy. Every morning, he would ask for his horse and put me in the saddle. I screamed the first time, frightening the stable hand Demosthenes, an old black man who was enslaved by his meager wages and who trembled before my father. I fell the second time. Demosthenes picked me up, and my father told him:
“Put her back on the horse.”
Crying, I clung to his neck.
“Put her back in the saddle,” my father screamed.
The poor man had to obey.
I fell again and Demosthenes grabbed me in his arms and ran to the house.
“Madame,” he said to my mother. “He’s going to kill your little girl.”
My father came to get me. He struck Demosthenes, angrily tore me from my mother’s arms and stood me in front of the animal.
“He’s not going to do anything to you,” he said, “look!”
He put my frozen hand on the horse’s muzzle, sat me back in the saddle and whipped his rump.
I screamed in terror, and then stiffened my legs and thighs around the horse’s warm belly. A month later, he galloped with me beneath the trees in the courtyard.
While waiting to be dispatched to France, I spent my time with other daughters from bourgeois families at the École Nationale of the French sisters, whose mother superior was a friend of my mother’s. This meant I was watched closely. At home, it fell to my father to make me do my work. Every day I was punished for the blots in my notebook. The punishment consisted of kneeling with arms crossed, chin up, next to my father. Eyes closed, trembling with fatigue, I would wait for the “get up” that signaled an end to my torment. Sometimes I would cry, and then the punishment lasted much longer.
Twice a week, from my room I heard my father yell orders to the servants and gallop away to Lion Mountain, which is what they called the six hundred acres planted with coffee, from which he extracted our prosperity. My father, very proud of his coffee, bragged about having studied agronomy in France and, unlike the other planters, personally watched over his field hands.
When I turned ten he gave me my own horse, which I promptly named Bon Ami, perhaps foreseeing the moral solitude that awaited me.
People tended to keep to themselves. When we did have guests, and this was rare, our living room would open to the Granduprés, Bavières, Soubirans, Duclans, Camuses, Audiers, M. Prélat, a French merchant set up on Grand-rue, French ship captains and crew, and all the best society from Port-au-Prince, always received in the French style with plenty of wine and champagne. Our port was opened to Europe and the United States, and Grand-rue overflowed with French, German, English and American products. The Syrians, recently naturalized as Haitians in order to benefit legally from all of our privileges, were also supplied by these boats.
In the year 1912, I was barely twelve when I became friends with Térésa Aboud, a very sweet Syrian girl with long black hair who spoke nothing but Creole. I only saw her at school, and even then only while concealing it from the mother superior. One day she came and told us that the Syrians were being driven out of the country by the president of Haiti and that they, the Abouds, would starve to death in Kingston, where they planned on taking refuge. My friends and I found such a measure truly unfair and took Térésa under our protection.
“Papa,” I asked my father at the dinner table, “why does President Leconte [17] want to drive the Syrians out of our town?”
“Because they are getting rich at our expense,” my father replied. “What’s more, they spend little, hoard money, and are seeking protection under the wings of foreign powers whose citizens they now claim to be. Because of their disloyalty, the competition has become unfair and the poor Haitians are being driven to bankruptcy.”
“We waited too long to drive them out,” my mother interjected with rancor. “The competition ruined my parents.”
“Is that true, Mama?”
“It’s true, my child.”
Back in school, I avoided talking to Térésa and also refused the candy she offered me every day.
“Why?” she asked me.
“You have ruined my mother’s parents,” I answered harshly, “so go back to your own country.”
One evening, I saw my father come home all worked up, announcing that British warships had weighed anchor in Port-au-Prince harbor to protect their Syrian subjects. Dora Soubiran, Eugénie Duclan, Jane Bavière, Agnès Grandupré and I trapped Térésa at the gate and beat her up.
The next day, my father received Dr. Audier and my friends’ fathers. They seemed really worked up, and the cocktails prepared by my mother, who tiptoed in and out like a shadow, stoked their vigor and agitation.
“The foreigner has invaded our country,” my father barked. “Our businesses are now in the hands of the French, the Germans, the British and the Americans. The Syrians are mere surrogates. All of this is simply competition between the great powers. Who is it that’s arming the people and teaching them to say: ‘Down with the Syrians’?”
“The French,” Dr. Audier replied.
“And who is openly protesting the expulsion of the Syrians?”
“The Americans and the British,” Dr. Audier answered again, looking to the others as witnesses.
“The United States is afraid to be supplanted by the Europeans in imports,” my father added. “It’s a cold war between Europe and the United States. What are we in all of this? Lost lambs devoured by wolves. Only one man has been able to meet the challenge and drive out these Syrian undesirables, and this man is none other than our beloved leader. Long live President Leconte!”
“Long live Leconte,” they roared, raising their glasses.
“The people will suffer from unemployment,” my father continued. “They will be prey to poverty in a country without i
ndustry. These great powers call us incompetent: they insinuate themselves into our affairs, demand control of our customhouses and, like jackals, fight over our very hides. I am a patriot, a nationalist, and I will defend what I believe to be the national interest until my dying breath…”
“Long live Deputy Clamont!” a short, chubby man named Laurent cried out.
“Long live our deputy!” the others echoed.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” my father answered quietly, as if he were not privately enjoying these outbursts of enthusiasm. “My hour has not yet struck but I am sure it will. For now, I will continue to give my full support to our leader and to watch the opposition closely. I am returning to Port-au-Prince on the next ferry. In my absence, anyone who betrays him must be denounced to the police and punished without mercy…”
My mother found me hiding under the table, my eyes fixed on my father.
The next day, at dawn, the clarion call of the district commandant got us out of bed. We rushed to the balcony. He was resplendent in his uniform with its huge epaulettes and his bicorne hat. He was reading out a statement, surrounded by a police force of “little soldiers,” [18] whose shoulder sashes emblazoned with the word Police were the only thing that distinguished them from beggars.
“Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” he began…
And we learned that the Syrian businesses had just been notified of the order of liquidation.
I wasn’t there to witness the departure of Térésa Aboud because I was in bed with measles. My friends had been forbidden to come near my house for fear of contagion. When a week later I was able to leave my room, from the veranda I noticed the sealed doors of the Syrian shops, and Dora told me that a fanatic had struck Térésa’s mother with a stone as she stepped aboard the American ship.
A little later, our simmering little city learned that the Palais National had been bombed and that more than three hundred soldiers had perished with President Leconte. Reports accumulated and spread far and wide. Day and night, men were scuttling in the streets at all hours or gathering at the Cercle to discuss politics more freely. Who gave my father such an absurd idea? I never found out. But soon he launched his electoral campaign and began preparing his speeches.
Love, Anger, Madness Page 11