He frowned and looked at me without answering and then leaned over his patient. When he finished with the bandage, he looked up and said:
“You are quite changed, Claire.”
“For better or worse?”
“I don’t know. But something in you rings false.”
“So then, for the worse,” I said triumphantly. And I pressed my lips together tight.
Imbecile! I felt like yelling at him. I’m not the little prude you once knew, take me in your arms.
He left two days later without trying to see me again.
That very evening, I received the lieutenant, who came with Jane. She was pretty, lively, spontaneous. The lieutenant loved her and wanted to marry her. From where I sat, I could see movement behind Mme Bavière’s blinds; like all mothers in this town, she tyrannized and spied on her daughter. I gently closed my door to prevent her from seeing what was going on in my house. How did I become so open-minded if not from the desire to avenge my strict upbringing? Rebelling against everything that had been branded upon me, I insisted on destroying all myths without seeming to do so and was shaking off my yoke in secret. Through the open door, Annette mischievously spied on the enlaced lovers. Soon enough I saw her hanging off Jacques Marti’s neck, kissing him on the lips. I smiled. She dared do what I, sixteen years her senior, never could. Frantz Camuse was lost to me forever; I knew that all hope of getting married was to be buried. What man here could ever replace him?
But then one day Justin Rollier returned from Port-au-Prince. Twelve years had passed since my father’s death. We saw each other again with pleasure, and in the evenings once again a man’s voice could be heard in the house. Annette caressed and kissed him and kept repeating that he was the handsomest man in this province. Had all three of us been in love with him? Félicia smiled calmly over her embroidery while Augustine and I set the table as quietly as possible and served our guest. Once, I caught Félicia staring at him and realized then that she too could become a dangerous rival one day. Justin was cheerful. He sang beautiful love songs for us and recited poetry.
“My three Graces!” he cried out one evening before the charming group we made under the lamplight.
“Which do you prefer?” Annette asked. “Which of us do you find most beautiful?”
“My heart cannot choose between the three of you,” he answered laughing, but his eyes met mine in a very loving way.
Annette was just a child. Justin was thirty years old. In private, he gave me one of his poems and asked me to wait three years for him. The deadline he had given himself to find a position and save up a little money so he could start a family.
“I am leaving, Claire, I have to. But if you promise to wait for me, I will come back and I will marry you. Three years go by quickly. At least that’s what we’ll tell ourselves to be more patient…”
I didn’t even have the guts to give him my hand.
When he returned, Annette was fifteen. She jumped on his neck but in a different way. He defended himself, sought me with his eyes, but he stared at Annette with admiration. He was visiting just as often as before, but he wasn’t coming for me, as I quickly realized. Annette had eclipsed me without even trying, and in comparison I could feel the decline of my youth. One night I caught them kissing and I ran to my room and locked myself in.
“I love Justin,” Annette told me the next day, “and he loves me. Oh! Claire, I’m so happy!”
We learned of her engagement at the same time we learned of Jane’s. Three months later, Justin died of pneumonia and Jane’s lieutenant in a car accident on his way to Port-au-Prince where he had been recalled.
Annette cried, then forgot. Jane, however, was pregnant. I was the first to whom she confessed this. Tattooed as I was by my bourgeois upbringing, I feared the responsibility and abandoned her in her distress. Her parents shut her away. She fled. I let her run without helping her. During the five years she lived in the lowly quarter where girls from good families were forbidden to go, I avoided talking to her or even greeting her. I think this is the only mistake for which I reproach myself. A few days after the death of the lieutenant, a new district commandant arrived by the name of Calédu.
With this name I will return to the present. Dawn rises on my sleepless night. I have tried to revive without too much distortion those I have known and those cut down by death. I don’t know to what extent I have succeeded. This resurrected past appeared to me as through a thick veil behind which I have evolved separate from my real self: an astonished spectator of my own life.
The corner grocer is the latest victim. I just learned this from an overexcited Mme Audier. This somewhat undermines Dr. Audier’s diagnosis regarding Calédu’s attacks against the bourgeois class. Mme Potiron’s little grocery has literally been pillaged.
“The agenda is not the same this time,” Dr. Audier explained to Jean Luze. “Believe me, Madame Potiron will not be tortured. The armed beggars have to eat, don’t they? Jacques Marti’s murder, the arrest of the poets, the arrest of the grocer, all reveal the excessive zeal of a soldier hoping to attract the attention of his superiors and earn distinction. But the torture inflicted on a certain category of women conceals something else.”
“What do you mean?” Jean Luze asked.
“Well, simply that our commandant must have often been humiliated by our beautiful bourgeois women and is now avenging himself in his own fashion.”
“Class again!” Jean Luze said, frowning.
“And color. I don’t think I need to tell you that in this black nation, color prejudice is as subtle and dangerous as in the United States.”
“Have the blacks in this country suffered that much?”
“To be honest, yes,” Audier confided, lowering his head.
“Does that really mean Calédu needs to act like a savage?” Félicia then said. “We’ve tried to accommodate his sensitivities. We opened our doors to him. What more can he want?”
“For you to welcome him as a friend, perhaps,” Dr. Audier answered, “or for one of our beautiful ‘aristocrats’ to agree to marry him.”
“Oh no! Never that!” Félicia protested. “The concessions to which we’ve stooped are quite enough. And besides, who but Annette could be to his liking? All we have left is a bunch of old hags.”
“Félicia, dear!” Jean Luze said, “take it easy, this topic always upsets you.”
“I hate them, I hate them,” she stammered, Jean Luze’s hand on her cheek. “Annette’s marriage has already lowered our standing. I kept quiet. I put up with everything. But it was horrible…”
“Now do you see what I mean?” Dr. Audier asked, shaking his head at Jean Luze. “I wasn’t exaggerating, as you can see.”
“Yes, but between us,” he answered, “Calédu and the others in power do nothing to make themselves likable. One is a vulgar criminal and the others are vile upstarts ready to do anything to fill their pockets. Surely there must be men of a different caliber somewhere in this country.”
“Well, you are beginning to get it, then, and for once you have come to the heart of the matter,” Dr. Audier said jubilantly “Do you think, my friend, that people worth their salt would act like Calédu or like Monsieur Trudor? They have been chosen precisely because of what they represent.”
“Yes. But their abuses can only make things worse.”
“They have found an opportunity to take revenge, to have their turn at humiliating us…”
And suddenly turning toward Mme Audier, who hadn’t said a word:
“You, my wife,” he said, “what did you once tell me after I invited Dr. Béranger for dinner?”
“That I had never seen blacks at my parents’ table,” she answered impatiently.
“And the same was true for the Clamonts,” Dr. Audier continued, “and for the Camuses, the Duclans, and the Soubirans, the same was true for all of us.”
“Too bad the commandant is a criminal,” Jean Luze then said, looking straight ahead, “because otherwise I might sympathize wi
th him. In any case, he has made himself the representative of hatred and violence and no honest man could agree to absolve him.”
“By no means,” Dr. Audier concluded. “He has gone about it altogether badly. They should all go to hell!”
And seized with panic, he sprang to the door, opening it slightly in order to inspect the street…
Yes, maybe they’re right to behave the way they do, I then told myself. Yes, maybe I would be just as covetous if I were in their shoes, and just as ruthless. One thing remains true: hatred only breeds hatred.
Calédu recently spit in my path with contempt. His armed beggars are aggressive and act as if they were great leaders in their rags. They track us down like wild beasts. We walk around like beaten dogs, tails between our legs and noses to the ground. Terrorized and tamed by flea-bitten bums and upstarts. How humiliating!…
Last night’s dream disturbs me still: I was alone, standing in broad daylight in the middle of an immense arena framed by stands filled with agitated, terrifying crowds. They were screaming and calling me out and pointing at me with their fingers. What were they accusing me of? I ran, ashamed of my nakedness, looking in vain for a dark corner where I could hide, when suddenly I saw a stone statue before me. At that moment, the crowd’s cries became deafening. The statue, with its enormous phallus stiffened in a voluptuous and painful spasm, was of Calédu. The statue came to life and the phallus wagged feverishly. I threw myself at its feet, submissive and rebellious, hardly daring to look up, my thighs shut tight. I heard cries: “Kill, kill!” The crowd was cheering on Calédu to murder me. Cold metal caressed the skin of my neck as ferocious laughter replaced the screaming of the suddenly silent spectators. The weapon sank slow and deep into my flesh. For a long time I remained immobile, frozen in terror. Then, rising, I walked in a thick mist, my hands in front of me, beheaded, with my head dangling on my chest. Dead and living through my death…
Such nightmares are familiar to me now. How many times have I been chased by mad bulls, by low beasts, monsters, all wanting to rape or kill me? When I was a little girl, I often dreamed that my father had been transformed into a roaring two-legged creature with a lion’s mane, whipping me as I searched in vain for the key that would release me from his cage!
We were invited to spend the day at the Trudors’. Jean-Claude could have been my excuse to stay home but Félicia wants to take him along because of the beach.
“I know you,” Annette said to me, “no last-minute cancellation. I’ll go get you myself if the Luzes come without you.”
So, whether I liked it or not, I had to go.
The prefect’s modern villa is the only beautiful building in our area. It looks ostentatiously out of place beside our old buildings with their twenty doors and windows and their balconies and gables, which instantly evoke the original history of a fabulous past. If, as Mme Trudor said the other night, her husband serves the Republic for peanuts, then he must also have discovered a gold mine. In the midst of their chandeliers, silk curtains and carpets, you forget all about the beggars and become convinced you have been transported into another world. It is less hot today. The sea is before us. The water is so calm that one can look on its sandy depths undulating as far as the eye can see. Under a veranda covered with bougainvillea in bloom, Mme Trudor is frantically arranging a monumental buffet, and she greets me with enthusiasm.
“At last, an intelligent person who can help me with this,” she says to me. “These servants can be so dumb!…”
Does she think, as I do in fact, that my place is in the pantry? In any case, I’ll be kept busy and that’s fortunate. I feel ill at ease beside these half-naked women. Félicia has put Jean-Claude down on some cushions at her feet and Annette is cooing over him, posing in adoration. Jean Luze is chatting with M. Trudor, drinking whiskey on the rocks. He seems pretty cheerful. The sight of so much female flesh must not be unpleasant for him. I catch him staring somewhat frequently at a tall bimbo with tanned skin, a very fashionable girl from Port-au-Prince staying with the Trudors and playing the ingénue. He goes inside to get changed and comes back in bathing trunks. Mme Trudor and I are the only ones not swimming. It would amuse me to see her half-naked. It doesn’t flatter me to be paired with her. Do they think I don’t have a good body? Even Annette doesn’t have my sculpted abdomen. Félicia wears a more decent bathing suit, probably to hide her bulges. She doesn’t suffer from false shame; she’s lucky that way.
Gleaming with sweat, M. Trudor prances among the ladies, happy to play the pasha in his luxury villa. He gives Jean Luze a tour of the house, waving his finger in the air.
“You are an intellectual, one can sense that. Come, I will show you something you will appreciate.”
He takes him to the library to let him admire his books. One gets the feeling that they are sitting there for show. Perhaps they have never been opened.
After they leave, I take a look around the library: it’s actually a very good one. I gaze for a moment at the nude body of Salammbô [25] embraced by a colorful snake on a morocco leather cover; I quickly scan a few familiar titles suddenly made less appealing in their pompous finery, and then sneak away to mingle with the others outside.
During dinner, the girl from Port-au-Prince turns to Jean Luze. They go around the buffet together chatting. She offers to guide him; there she is, picking out dishes he points to with his finger. I look for Félicia. She is cradling Jean-Claude and sipping a cool drink.
They say people are always disappointing the more you get to know them. Is it because I hope to be disappointed that I watch Jean Luze’s every move? Everything I have seen of him has only increased my admiration. Even his harshness toward Annette is justified in my eyes. Repression has given me the nose of a good hunting dog. I can smell the squirming of others’ thoughts merely by dilating my nostrils. Despite reassuring appearances, my nose tells me things aren’t going well for Félicia.
She who is generally so confident now seems to give off something nervous and unstable. She always remakes others in her own image. Even after the scene she witnessed with her own eyes, she still somehow sees Jean Luze as a man without weaknesses, a man Annette provoked in vain. In the same way, she also refuses to admit that Jean-Claude has worn her out. He must be the best baby in the world for he is her son. Despite the sleepless nights, she insists that he only cries when he’s hungry. I shudder to see her being so stubborn as to banish the thought that he could get sick.
More nonexistent than ever, I continue to keep my vigil. I am so dull that I have become colorless. In any case, that’s the only way to escape being bad-mouthed. At least they have left me alone. Even Father Paul gives me communion without confession, as it were. He could cite me as an example in his sermons. Does he really believe in purity? I would call purity a total ignorance of the torments of the flesh or else the triumph of the will over them. If this victory can, according to religion, save the soul, how can one explain the sexual stirrings of a woman who has lived in eternal chastity.
I can hardly imagine my life outside this house. It shelters all the sad memories of my childhood and my youth. Running away might heal me of my passion. But the thought of leaving makes me sick. As shabby as it is, this province is the apple of my eye. Could I really break all my habits if Jean Luze were to take me with him? Am I nursing impossible hopes? Aren’t the friendship and admiration he has for me strengthening these hopes? Nevertheless, mysterious as he may be, have I not put my finger on his weakness? After all, he almost gave in to Annette. In fact, he did give in to her completely and lied to Félicia.
He’s grown friendly with Joël Marti. They talk about music and literature. I am astonished to see him so animated. He gets all worked up during these conversations and is full of exuberance.
“But no, no, you’re wrong, Chopin is still a poet, a melancholy poet, a musician for neurotics; Beethoven personifies courage in suffering, the struggle against misfortune. His infirmity enriched him instead of diminishing him. His behavior
should be an example for us. All of his compositions are hymns to life. Listen…”
He plays Chopin’s Concerto no. 1 for a minute and then Beethoven’s Concerto no. 5.
“Compare them,” he adds.
“Well, my old phonograph doesn’t have the same sound. It’s a very old machine, you know.”
Jean Luze laughs, he is happy. He needed friends! I bring them glasses, ice and what is left of the whiskey M. Long brought.
“No, Claire, some rum, Joël prefers rum and lately so do I,” Jean Luze tells me.
He leans over Joël.
“You are only twenty years old,” he tells him, “and you live in an outdated world. I will guide you. What authors do you like? It’s amazing to discover someone like you in a place like this, someone so curious, educated, enthusiastic and sensitive.”
“A lot of those arrested by Calédu were like me, hungry for more education. There were many of us here writing poetry, interested in music and literature. Our meetings were forbidden. We protested and they hunted us down. Some have disappeared and others have fled. I would like to leave too but, sadly, I am too poor.”
His shaking hand reaches for the rum bottle, and he helps himself. Later in the day, I see him staggering home.
Jean Luze has no idea how easily these misunderstood poets can get drunk.
Maybe this vice of theirs brings them a false sense of transcendence.
I’m being unfair. They are right to seek distraction from their suffering, to drown their unhappiness in a sea of alcohol, because their future is as dark as an abyss…
***
Jean Luze now feels compelled to restrict Joël’s drinking. He even preaches to him about it.
“Take it easy, Joël, easy,” he said to him today, taking the rum bottle from his hands. “It’s a slippery slope.”
Joël, already drunk, doesn’t take it well.
“Oh no, absolutely no lectures please or I’ll drink elsewhere.”
He becomes abusive and Jean Luze calms him.
“I only want what’s right for you, you know.”
Love, Anger, Madness Page 15