“I know, I know. But what bothers me about our friendship is that you will never understand…”
“Never understand what? That you want to get piss-drunk. No, I’ll never get that. I understood your despair better when you were trying to console yourself with poetry. All of you seem to think you have a monopoly on suffering. Nothing can better drag a nation into moral and intellectual bankruptcy than believing its misery is special.”
“And what do you know about misery?” Joël screams.
“I know what I know!”
“Do you know who my brother was? Do you know what he meant to me? When my parents died, he took care of me like a father. He was intelligent, honest. They drove him insane. It’s their fault, you hear me, their fault! And I too will go insane one day…”
“Oh, enough of that!” Jean Luze lashes out in a voice so forceful that the boy is startled. “Are you also going to throw yourself headfirst into the trap they’ve set for you? You want it to be your turn to serve as their target?”
Joël looks away.
“What’s the use, they’re going to get us all,” he mutters in a mournful and desperate voice. “We’re caught in the teeth of the gear and the only solution is flight or despair.”
“No, you have to fight.”
“With our bare fists?”
“You have to hope,” Jean Luze replies more gently. “Those who sow hatred will reap it one day. Those who beat and torture are only cogs in an already weak system. Behind their hatred lie other hatreds. You have to hold it together and wait for your moment.”
Joël listens to him passionately.
Oh, imagine following him in pursuit of some impossible dream! Yes, he’s an idealist. But how rejuvenating it is to hope wildly and even dream about building a new and better world.
Last night he entertained Joël’s friends. Sad poets, overcome with alcoholism, who stumble along the walls when the sun goes down. He has found people to protect, guide, advise. He feels he’s doing something useful with his life. Maybe thanks to them he will decide not to leave!
“Jean has finally made some friends,” Félicia says. “I hear Joël is incredibly intelligent, and that he likes music and books as well.”
How lonely he must have been! I am ashamed of us. Oh! What I wouldn’t give to get rid of my complexes. They stop me from opening my mouth and expressing my ideas even when I’m choking on them. We put all of our intellect in the service of profit and flattery Whatever Dr. Audier says, terror has turned us into resigned cowards. Who will help us? Who is fearless and has the courage to cry out the truth if not Jean Luze? I listen without taking part in any of these conversations. The screams wafting from the prison make both of us wince. “Filthy torturer! Filthy torturer!” he muttered the other night, angrily running his hand through his hair. He’ll end up making himself a suspect. I can see the moment when Calédu will accuse him of meeting with “suspicious intellectuals.” My silent hatred has even contaminated Félicia. “I can’t take it anymore,” she once burst out, covering her ears… She was so afraid of her own voice that she suddenly fell silent with her eyes closed and her mouth agape. And I could see her lashes trembling with tears.
Eugénie Duclan is getting married. She is happy as a lark, going door-to-door to announce the joyful event. Annette bursts out laughing when she shares the news with Félicia.
“Paul is sure that poor Charles has been ‘past it’ for ages, if you know what I mean. Eugénie will be so disappointed! But who would think to get married at that age!”
She takes me as her witness.
It seems that past a certain age, marrying for the sake of convenience is as ridiculous as marrying for love. Custom is as powerful as fashion-impossible to disregard either without giving offense.
Eugénie Duclan
is so bold
at forty years old
to let it all hang…
sings Annette. She did not invent the song, everyone knows it, as she is amused to tell Félicia.
Eugénie wants a first-class wedding and dares invite me to be part of her procession along with the other Daughters of Mary. She has done her hair and made herself up like a young girl. It looks like she’s wearing a wrinkled, sexless, tragic mask.
“I know people are making fun of me,” she tells me, “but that’s too bad. Would you agree to be my maid of honor? We have to stick together…”
Who should stick together, and why?
I nearly throw her out after promising to do everything she wants. The only thing I’m afraid of is Jean Luze catching me in such grotesque company. I don’t care to belong to any sisterhood. The idea that I’m an old maid, set apart and original, pleases me…
Jean Luze is talking with Joël in the living room as Annette flits around them. Félicia is nursing Jean-Claude. Jean Luze is so absorbed in conversation that he doesn’t even notice Annette’s presence. He is leaning over Joël and speaking to him in a low voice. It’s Joël who seems distracted. His eyes follow Annette, and Jean Luze turns around angrily.
“Why are you buzzing around us?” he asks her.
“Me, buzzing around you?” she asks, taken aback. “But I’m doing no such thing.”
She runs downstairs and joins Félicia in the dining room.
“Apparently, I am a nuisance to our gentlemen and their philosophical discussions. I wonder what your husband thinks is so special about that little birdbrain.”
“He’s very cultivated for his age, Jean told me.”
“Bah! he’s a man all the same, isn’t he?”
“What do you expect? Intellectuals are interested in things besides women.”
“That’s a shame!”
Félicia yawns.
“But you yourself have nothing to complain about. Are you happy?” she asks Annette.
“Yes.”
“Paul is a good husband?”
“He’s a good lover.”
“What does that mean?”
Annette smiles wickedly and fixes a lock of hair on her lovely forehead.
“It means what it means. You’re no choir girl. It’s just that some husbands don’t do right by their wives. Making love is little more than an obligation for them. Wham bam, and that’s it! Such husbands are bad lovers; but others treat their wives like mistresses: they are good husbands and good lovers at the same time.”
“What theories!”
“Well, it’s not so bad in practice either, believe me.”
She said this protectively, sure of herself. Is she trying to diminish Jean Luze in Félicia’s eyes with these insinuating comparisons? Or was she offering her opinion of him in light of her more recent experience?
“I’m only telling you what Paul taught me,” she continues cruelly. “If a man is holding a woman in his arms and restrains himself, he’s either impotent or abnormal.”
I notice a worried look in Félicia’s eyes.
“Well, I assume that’s never happened to you,” she says weakly.
“It did, once.”
Félicia’s fingers curl around the arm of her chair.
“Ah! Well, what does any of this matter as long as people love each other,” she adds, annoyed.
“I used to think the same way before Paul.”
“So your Paul is a god?”
“No. He’s a black man and he knows how to take a woman. He is so passionate that all he would have to do is brush against your hand to desire you.”
“Don’t tell your friends about that.”
“I’ll kill anyone who comes near him.”
“You’re crazy,” Félicia replied simply.
But she was gasping.
The rain requires fresh processions, this time to make it stop. It’s raining interminably and, as luck would have it, right after the extensive clear-cutting of trees. For fifteen days, we have heard the whine of M. Long’s electric saw without interruption. A tree falls every five minutes. I crept around the coast yesterday to witness this bloodbath. Immense tr
ees fell to the ground with what sounded like a great roar before their dying breath. The whole region had already been cleared and the peasants, harassed by Calédu, wore inscrutable, hostile, troubled faces. Avalanches of soil slid down the mountains and piled around their feet. Coffee is nothing but a memory for all of us. Timber export has replaced that business. When the wood is gone, he will go after something else. The slave trade, perhaps. He could easily ship hundreds from among the beggars. There’s been recent talk about hiring out peasants to cut sugarcane in the Dominican Republic. This was mentioned in the Port-au-Prince newspapers that Dr. Audier regularly receives. A commission composed of doctors, typists and accountants is expected to arrive next week. The human trade known as Operation Fight the Famine has begun. Is M. Long also getting in on the scheme? Word has spread and the peasants are abandoning their bleached, bled-dry land to watch the cars arriving from Port-au-Prince. Their number swells day by day.
I hear that they’ve been reduced to eating dogs at Lion Mountain. “Why not? We do eat beef and goat, after all,” Annette says. I can see it coming, we’ll soon turn into cannibals. Many of us find this entertaining. “Ugh! Eating dog! It must taste awful! And what criminal instincts these children have!” Mme Audier opines. Eugénie Duclan simply accuses them of being gluttonous and abnormal. “There’s no other way to understand it. Other people’s problems are their own business, of course, that’s as sure as death.”
“In the street I see people so filthy that I want to throw up,” Annette complains. “It’s disgusting. They could at least wash.”
She is pregnant and her husband has taken the habit of imposing her upon us more and more. Is it so she won’t get suspicious? He always claims to be detained by business meetings. Annette goes after Félicia without mercy. She can hardly think what else to come up with next to hurt her and destroy her peace. Does she envy her, contrary to what she says? Tension is rising between them. Félicia can be pretty resourceful when it comes to defending her man.
“But I’m not talking about Jean,” Annette protests hypocritically. “What makes you think I am?”
Félicia’s lips are trembling. She has to restrain herself in order not to make it obvious she knows Annette is just a woman scorned. That’s my view of her as well. In any case, she’s getting her revenge on Félicia. The way you take revenge defines you: she does it in a petty, boorish way.
Showing up an hour late, Paul is greeted with cries of joy at the living room door. Annette looks around to make sure they are alone, and then changes her tone and expression:
“I don’t believe you and your business meetings,” she says angrily, “I don’t believe it.”
I can see the day when she comes to regret this union, and when Paul will reproach her in good Haitian fashion for not being a virgin on their wedding night.
The recruitment agents have arrived. They are lodged all over town and have set up shop in Mme Potiron’s former store. Hundreds of peasants pass through in single file, and are accepted or rejected depending on their health and age. Apparently some of them go so far as to purchase work permits from doctors who are exploiting the situation. Dr. Audier refused to issue health certificates to three patients with tuberculosis, but they left with the others anyway. In the distance, the abandoned mountains rise impassive. The recruiters are leaving tomorrow and the peasants are already piling into the trucks with sacks on their backs.
“Where are you going?” people ask them.
“Off to cut cane in the Dominican Republic.”
“For money?”
“Of course! Do we look like we would sweat for nothing in some white man’s country?”
“What do you have to do to get hired?”
“Go sign up at the desk. And if your health is no good, pay someone and you’ll get a spot for sure.”
“Will we come back rich at least?”
“Who knows. We’re going to try our luck.”
The mountains continue to empty out, growing even more impassive.
It’s amazing that the trade of our compatriots could leave us so cold.
“They’re going to seek their fortunes elsewhere,” Mme Audier told me. “They’re better off than we are.”
Félicia is steadfast in her principles. I am not unaware of this, but I go to Jane’s more and more often.
“You’re going too far, Claire,” she told me recently, “and you are setting a bad example for Annette. Don’t you think?”
“Jane needs help,” I responded.
“Fine, give in to your soft heart, send her some work, but don’t see her so often. Soon there will be gossip about this friendship, you know our little world.”
Father Paul went after me as well. I ran into him just as I was just about to go inside Jane’s home.
“What do you want in that girl’s house, my child?” he asked me.
“She’s making dresses for me.”
“Félicia is right. You are getting dresses made for yourself quite often these days. I don’t need to tell you these visits worry your sister and that she’s the one who alerted me. I hope there is nothing untoward in your relations with Jane Bavière.”
He leaned on his walking stick and looked like the grim reaper under his black robe. I’m not young anymore, and he should have realized this. But he had known me to be so fainthearted and timid that he refused to believe I’d changed.
“What do you mean, Father?”
“Life has denied you certain pleasures, my child; try not to seek them in sin.”
“There is no call for such vile accusations,” I answered, shaking with rage.
“I am a priest, I am fulfilling my priestly duty in protecting you from yourself…”
I interrupted him impertinently.
“Yes, but I don’t like priests who preach slander by example.”
“You are defending those who live in sin so bitterly that you have forgotten yourself in this case. I don’t recognize you anymore. Don’t you know that men visit her at night?”
I turned my back on him and went to knock on Jane’s door. She immediately realized I was beside myself.
“You’re shaking,” she said, “are you sick?”
She read my silence. Her face became sad.
“They’re giving you a hard time on account of me, aren’t they?” she continued. “I know they condemn me. Your friendship is precious to me but I won’t ask you to come back.”
She had me sit and then returned to her work.
“I don’t know how to make these people happy,” she continued. “Because I had a child outside of wedlock, I am guilty of every possible sin; you deprived yourself of everything, yet they don’t spare you either. I really don’t know how to make them happy.”
She took her son in her arms and kissed him tenderly.
“Well, I’m happy, too bad for them,” she added.
“I’m not.”
She pushed the child toward me.
“Give Claire a kiss too,” she said. “Give her a big hug.”
And the child, putting his arms around me, gave me a gentle peck on the cheek.
“He’ll be a man soon enough,” Jane added. “And you’re never lonely with a man when you love him.”
I am surprised by my interest in Jean Luze and Joël Marti’s discussions. They could never accuse me of buzzing around them. No, I sit too humbly in my chair with my sewing. Who would ever look askance at me? Therein lies my strength. I am also surprised by the sympathy I suddenly feel for Joël. This Joël whose birth I witnessed without ever taking the slightest interest in him. That was true even when he became an orphan, because you can look without seeing, meet without knowing, give without sharing. From the outset, I refused to have anything to do with others and remained neutral. Now I am becoming too human, too involved. It’s Jean Luze’s fault. It’s dangerous. I am taking on too much. I am making everything my business. But oh, my head spins! It releases secret enthusiasm in me!
Félicia is bedridden again.
Could she be pregnant again? Jean-Claude is only six months old. She doesn’t deprive herself of anything. In any case, I’m taking care of the child now. He spends more time with me than with her. I soothe and coddle him.
This morning, while I was strolling with him on the veranda, Jean Luze addressed me, somewhat uncomfortably.
“Claire,” he said, “though I am a little ashamed to take advantage of your kindness, I’m going to ask you to take Jean-Claude into your room for a few days. I’m worried about Félicia’s health.”
He wanted to take the crib to my room right away but I stopped him, panic-stricken.
“Give me a minute to make room for him,” I protested, trembling to see him enter my sanctuary unexpectedly.
“Of course,” he answered. “By the way, while we’re on the subject, why do you lock your door?”
The minute he left, I ran to put my treasures in a safe place. I hid the doll as best I could in the wardrobe, made sure that my books were back under the bed, and opened my door, shivering as if I personally were about to be violated.
Jean-Claude has been my guest for several days now. I wake up at night to change and rock him to sleep. This hot, living little body against me. I’m happy to see him soil his diapers, empty his bottle, whimper for more. The smell of talcum powder and milk, it all makes Félicia ill. She kisses her son and throws up. She is definitely allergic to her condition. Jean Luze lives in my room. Blessed be this new pregnancy, this new pregnancy that tortures her. May she give birth ten, twenty times more so that she will give him to me. I will be nanny to all these children. I will work myself to death for them as long as their father is somewhat mine. He’s rolling around on my bed playing with his son, he’s resting on my bed. On my sheets he leaves behind the smell of a man’s body, of tobacco, of clean rough sweat. I deeply inhale the pillow where his head was resting; I kiss his son where he kissed him. I bask in my good fortune. He often returns from work with groceries, holding them out to me as if I were his wife. His eyes rest on me and he pinches my cheek to thank me, probably for taking such good care of Jean-Claude. I run to the pantry to get him that steaming cup of black coffee he loves above all things.
Love, Anger, Madness Page 16