Granting myself a final and supreme bit of vanity, I’ve put on my nicest nightgown, untied my hair and got in bed. Everything has to be perfect, it’s a point of honor. I feel wrapped in cool air. Am I hesitating? Ah! Cowardice, how full your disguises! The dagger is in my hand. I am preparing for death. The rough touch of my sheets is gone. I am gliding in silk. So sublime. Can this be me walking ecstatically, draped in crimson, toward that strange land of shadows? The fever is rising. Now I am buried in a shroud of flowers. I am spewing mist. I’m pierced by the freezing air. I am an iceberg pushed by the wind across the vast expanses of the sea. In the end this bitch of a life is not such a bitch when the heart has even the slightest reason to hope. Yes, but what about me, do I have some reason to hope?
I lift the weapon to my left breast, when the cries of a riotous mob shake me out of my delirium. Stretching out my arm with the drawn dagger, I listen. Where are these cries coming from? Now my attention is turned away from its goal. Life, death, do they depend on chance? I hide the dagger in my blouse and I come down. There are so many beggars that their stench overpowers me. The street is lit by the peasants’ torches. They are hollering, “Down with Mister Long,” and walking toward the American. He immediately aims a submachine gun: twenty fall. Calédu and his officers rush to the police station. They apparently intend to reestablish order by shooting in the air. I have the impression a bullet came from Jane’s house. Pierrilus draws his gun from his rags and aims at Calédu, and others do the same: three policemen fall to the ground. The bullets whizz by me, coming, I am now sure, from Jane’s balcony: I recognize Joël and Jean lying low behind the balusters. Uniforms are strewn on the ground. The commandant retreats as he fires. He is afraid, alone in the dark, hounded by the beggars he himself armed. He is moving backward toward my house. Does he realize that? Behind the blinds of the living room, I watch and wait for him.
I take my dagger from my blouse and open the door partway. He is on my veranda. I see him hesitate and turn his head in every direction. He is within reach. With extraordinary strength, I plunge the dagger into his back once, twice, three times. The blood spurts. He turns around, gripping the door, and looks at me. Is he going to die here, under my own roof? I see him stagger away and fall stretched out in the street, right in the middle of the gutter. The beggars, led by Pierrilus, fling themselves on his body like madmen.
No one has seen me, except perhaps Dora Soubiran, whose house is so close to mine. I cautiously close the dining room door. I hear Jean-Claude crying and Félicia talking. The wild cries of the beggars grow more intense. Behind the blinds glow hundreds of anguished eyes.
Jean Luze appears with a smoking gun. I hear Joël Marti holler:
“To the prison! Free the prisoners!”
A vast clamor rises in response.
Jean Luze grabs my hands. One of them still holds the dagger red with blood.
“Like an animal, he died like an animal,” I slowly articulate.
“You killed him? You? So you’re the one who got him? Oh! Claire…”
He squeezes me in his arms, almost smothering me. His cheek against mine, his breath in my ear.
“If you only knew how tired I am!”
Was it I who said these words? Was I the one who gently, very gently, pushed him away?
I leave him. He follows me with his eyes without moving. I go in my room and double-lock the door. Here I am on my bed, contemplating this blood on my hands, this blood on my robe, this blood on the dagger…
From the window, I catch a glimpse of the torches wavering in the wind. The doors of the houses are open and the entire town has risen.
ANGER
Part One
CHAPTER ONE
That morning, the grandfather had been the first to come down to the dining room. Hidden behind a half-open door, he was observing a corner of the yard, eyes wide with fear, ears pricked up.
Men in black were driving stakes around the house. Their uniforms gleamed with sweat in the sun of what was still morning. Their decorations, weapons and hammers reflected intermittent flashes of light; and the grandfather told himself they looked like plundering birds of prey walking around like that, bent over. What ghastly uniforms, and what right do they have, driving these stakes into my land? he said to himself.
The last steps on the stairs creaked, startling him out of his thoughts. He quickly wiped his face as if to erase the fear that had been imprinted there, and turned his head toward his son:
“Men in black uniforms are on our land. They’re driving stakes all around our house,” he said to him.
“Stakes!” the son cried out.
“Look!”
With a hand that was still firm, he drew him behind the door and pointed to the back of the yard:
“Look!” he said again.
At the sight of the men in uniform, the son mumbled a few unintelligible words that betrayed panic checked by immense willpower.
“They’ve been here since dawn,” the old man added.
His beard trembled. The son, afraid his father would burst into one of his terrible fits of anger, looked at him intently, annoyingly calm.
“Take it easy, Papa, above all keep calm.”
The top of the stairs creaked this time, just before a nineteen-year-old boy of athletic build all but tumbled down into the living room.
“Good morning!” he said.
And turning toward the table:
“Where’s Mélie?” he asked. “Has she decided to let us go without food this morning?”
He broke off, pricking up his ears, and before anyone could stop him he threw himself at the door, flinging it wide open.
“What’s going on? What are they doing at our place?”
“They’re driving stakes,” the old man said tersely.
“What right do they have?” the son protested.
“They’re here to bring us news of the death of our freedom,” the grandfather answered. “Don’t you understand that?”
He fell silent when he saw the maid. She entered slowly, dragging her feet with ostentatious innocence, and as she set the table she hypocritically observed the side of the yard where the men in black were working.
“At the very least we should ask them what they’re doing on our land,” the young man declared, “or else it will look like we’re afraid.”
“Keep still, Paul!” the father shouted, trying to rouse himself. “You see exactly what they’re doing: they’re planting stakes to keep us from our property.”
A heavy silence descended, which was especially uncomfortable for the maid, who now avoided lifting her eyes, her lips tight, features lifeless, like a statue hewed from the black stone of African antiquity.
Except for that moment when he had reprimanded his son, the father always spoke in a neutral, monotonous voice, in sharp contrast to the old man’s mute nervousness and the young man’s more exuberant manner. The grandfather looked from his son to his grandson. While the silence lasted, he kept staring at them with such insistence that a casual observer might have thought him senile.
“Evil has come upon us. We will have to fight to defeat it,” he finally said.
“Above all, we’ll have to act with caution,” replied the father, who had been waiting for the maid to leave before breaking his silence. “We’ll get a very good and very clever lawyer who knows how to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and we’ll need to follow his advice to the letter.”
“And if he declares, as I predict he will, that it’s a lost cause and that we have to accept this?” the grandfather asked.
“Well, then we’ll have to accept it.”
“I will never abandon my land to these thieves,” the grandfather yelled, walking toward his son, who quickly jumped to close the door. “My father sweated to acquire it, and I will not abandon my land to these thieves.”
He regained his composure with difficulty, pricking up his ears despite himself.
One could no longer hear the h
ammering. This unexpected silence coming from outside, as if in response to his anger, seemed so ominous to the old man that he pressed both hands on the table, bending his spine as if threatened by some immediate danger. The grandson crossed his arms, and knitting his brows, looked at his father; the latter seemed to have gone beyond plain fear. Huddled up, every muscle tense, he looked like a lion tamer locked in a cage with wild beasts and expecting to see them pounce and tear him to shreds at any moment.
“If they come, especially if they heard us, you’ll have to keep quiet and let me do the talking,” he begged in a voice so low that he could hardly be heard.
He clenched his teeth and the muscles of his face tightened.
The three of them stood like that for a long time. Then the young man looked away from his father, lifted his shoulders and walked to the door, opening it a second time.
“They haven’t moved,” he said with forced casualness.
And he sat at the table for breakfast. He pushed away the omelet that Mélie had prepared and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“Maybe, like my father said, we’ll have to accept it,” he said.
Hearing these words, the grandfather, his eyes bloodshot, left the table and went out on the porch. Thumbs in his suspenders, he paced up and down for a long time, then stopped, suddenly slouching: all around him stood the houses of the neighborhood, that old quarter of Port-au-Prince where he had grown up in comfort thanks to his father, a peasant who had managed to make it in the bigoted world of bourgeois blacks and mulattoes by dint of honest and sheer tenacity. He earned his position by the sweat of his brow, as the grandfather loved to declare to his son and grandson, and their name was respected to this day. A farmer from the market town of Cavaillon, the old patriarch-intelligent, crafty, tireless in his task-dreamed of a different life for his son. This house, this “big-house” as he called it in Creole, had been built at the end of Lysius Salomon’s rule, [28] and while everyone was finding their way into the troubled waters of politics, he had remained steadfastly committed to his business. During the 1887 currency adjustment that linked the Haitian gourde to the American dollar, he was able to accumulate a small fortune.
The colonial-style wooden house looked like all the established houses in the neighborhood. Rising up between courtyard and garden, they were decked with railed balconies and hat-shaped gables, and stood in the midst of sprawling properties planted mostly with fruit trees, mahogany and oak. Here and there, a few modern buildings lay flat and square at their feet, their scale limited by lack of land. Looking at them, the grandfather began to regret not having sold his properties, as others did, to the nouveaux riches and given the money to his children.
Humiliated by his father, a true Haitian black man who insisted on serving his loas [29] faithfully he had renounced the religious vocation he had been drawn to very early on. Once he was orphaned, he had also refused to rent the house, refused to leave the neighborhood, though he had no income to live on. After all, who else would take care of his father’s grave? For forty years, he had made do with the income from the sale of his fruit to the local peddlers who would come around to haggle with him.
Every day during harvest, he went to the garden and paid a few young black men to climb up the trees with sacks on their backs. Down came coconuts lopped off by machetes at the stem, and from furiously shaken branches the most lovely mangoes in the country rained down, and in this fashion he earned enough to condescend to accept the fifty gourdes [30] the peddlers gave him each month.
The stakes planted thirty meters from the house plainly separated it from the land-encircled it, in other words. Now the porch was the only means of egress. The grandfather thought he could see a whole host of dark silhouettes under the oaks and he nervously searched his pockets for his glasses. But there was nothing moving save the leafy branches of the trees on their hundred-year-old trunks. The freshly whitewashed grave of the ancestor stood out under the green of the lemon trees he had planted himself. Being a stubborn and superstitious peasant, he had demanded to be buried in that spot, swearing to look after his lands in death as well as he had while he was alive. And his son, who was only twenty then, could do nothing but obey.
“I will get him out of his grave,” the grandfather whispered. “I will get him out of his grave.” And angrily he began to pull on his wiry goatee.
Across the street, in a newer-looking house with stone walls and picture windows, he saw his friend Jacob, a Syrian who got rich quick selling American fabric. At dawn he had already caught him watching from behind the shutters, and he chased away an unpleasant thought that had been running through his mind from the moment he stepped on the porch. He guessed he was being watched by many eyes and he feigned indifference, walking around as casually as he did every morning, trying not to look at the houses next door. He returned to the dining room where his son’s wife, a light-skinned mulatto woman, had in the meantime come down and was eating. He sat down across from her in silence, crossed himself and mumbled a prayer.
“Claude isn’t up?” she asked him.
At that very moment, a sulky young voice called for help. The grandfather, pushing away his chair, went up the stairs and returned carrying a scrawny eight-year-old child with a pale yellow face and two immense, burning black eyes. A young woman, putting the last touches to her outfit, followed them. The grandfather had the child sit while the young woman served herself café au lait and drank it standing. She was a brunette with long thick hair that curled up around her head and fell back in a ponytail on the nape of her neck. Her dark skin gleamed gold in parts of her face, especially the cheeks, which made it seem like discreet makeup.
“Sit down, Rose,” her mother said.
Paul was watching her lap up the melted sugar in her cup and thought she looked like a pretty cat with its face deep in a dish.
She’s thin and fetching. Only a black woman can manage to be both thin and fetching: must have something to do with the shape of her rear end, he told himself. And he remembered how she had slapped his rich and smug friend Fred for having tried to kiss her. Thin, fetching without knowing it, but serious. Probably not an easy girl, he thought again. And he looked away from her, not without a feeling of pride.
“In the name of the Father, the Son,” the grandfather began again for the child. “Let us pray that God spares us and let us ask Him to inspire us so we may defeat the evil within us and around us.”
And as he spoke, his gaze rested on his daughter-in-law, who visibly avoided it.
“Eat, Claude,” she said to the child.
Breaking off some bread, she gave him some.
“Let me be, Mama, I’m not a baby anymore,” he protested impatiently.
And he smiled at the grandfather who treated him like a man.
“You promised me a story,” he said to him.
“Have I ever been untrue to my word?” the grandfather asked him.
The boy spilled a little coffee on himself, and the mother quickly wiped his mouth.
“Be careful, sweetie.”
“I am not a girl, only girls are called sweetie,” he retorted without mercy.
“Fine. From now on I will only call you Claude.”
“Yes, Claude, that’s our name, grandfather’s and mine.” He gestured to the old man, who took him in his arms as he rose.
“Let’s go in the garden,” he begged.
“No, not today.”
“But I love to be in the garden with you when you tell me stories and give me things to read. Besides, it’s high time to pick the fruit or else they’ll rot.”
“I know, but today we won’t go to the garden. We’re going to sit here and listen to the church bells. Since it so happens that my story is all about bells.”
The child was normal down to his thighs. At the end of his scrawny legs were two atrophied feet whose angled shape reminded one of lobster claws. He was usually dressed in long shirts that concealed his handicap; but on the day of his eighth birthday,
he demanded pants and socks which, according to his mother, was something the grandfather had suggested. For the latter, she was still persona non grata. She would always be little more than the daughter of a mulatto drunk who died prematurely from delirium tremens. He had objected to this union from the beginning. On the eve of the wedding, he had made a terrible scene before his son, shouting: “They’re a bunch of defectives, you’ll regret this.” And the invalid was born to prove him right. It was strange then, at least according to the others, that he preferred that little mulatto, born late, ungainly and in fragile health, but whose character resembled his more than his own son’s did. He was pleased to see him tear his hair out or bite his fist at the slightest frustration. “Except for the color of his skin, he’s my spitting image,” he beamed ecstatically, paying homage to the capricious laws of heredity, for he retained a sort of admiration, sustained by the memory of his fearsome father, for the black men of substance and courage from a bygone age.
Love, Anger, Madness Page 19