Love, Anger, Madness

without children.”

“People say that you are still after that scruffy pharmacist,” Mme Camuse says to her. “You’re not going to marry him, are you, Eugenie? Impossible. To think that you, the daughter of Edgar Duclan, could marry the illegitimate son of a black woman and a nameless mulatto.”

“That’s better than staying an old maid,” Eugenie replies, avoiding my gaze.

Ten years she’s been hanging on to Charles Farus, a griffe we knew nothing about until recently. He baptized his shack “Grande Pharmacie de la Grand-Rue.” He seemed rather fond of the adjective. This is now our only pharmacy, since a fire destroyed Dr. Audier’s. With its dusty shelves, its jars stuffed with camphor and naphthalene balls, it looks, as Jean Luze once described it, like a field hospital. Charles Farus could fix it up but he refuses to do so, blaming hurricanes for having ruined him once too many times. A former usurer, he has, some say, a small fortune he keeps stashed, like old Grandet, [14] at the bottom of a trunk, where he can count and contemplate it at his leisure. Who knows if his reputation as a rich man has not played some part in Eugenie’s decision. Also, it may be his connections. I have often seen him in the company of Caledu and the other men in charge. There was a time when his kind would never be received in our homes, so he must be gloating at the fact that a nearly destitute scion of one of our best families is now at his mercy. It’s hard to believe that Eugenie and I were once inseparable. How people do change! Not in character, because the core is immutable, but in taste. Luckily, mine has become refined with age.

Mme Camuse smirked at her with displeasure and gestured to me:

“Take these flowers,” she said. “They’re from the nuns’ altar, Father Paul offered them to me yesterday. They are still fresh, bring them to your parents. They were strict, it’s true. But look at what a perfect girl you are! And anyway, no point displeasing the dead, is there?”

I accept her flowers without thanking her and leave. The cemetery is not far. I walk there. The headstone is half buried in wild grass. I look around before throwing the flowers the way one throws a bone to a dog. Anyway, I will have the grave weeded and whitewashed so as not to invite criticism.

I turn to my doll for comfort, cradling her behind my locked door. Life has deprived me of the joys of motherhood, and a wealth of maternal love ferments within me. What crime have I committed to make me undeserving of such happiness? Maybe it’s not too late. Who wants to sleep with me? Who wants to knock me up? Free. No strings attached. No more bargaining… Well, I put on a good show. I’ll never have the courage. Besides, I am the kind of woman who does the choosing. My choice is Jean Luze. I hate my tired eyes, my first streaks of gray, and the wrinkles on my forehead. A star streaked across the sky and I wished on it. I sometimes feel like a monster. What am I running away from that I so drunkenly welcome this glimmer of love in my life? Maybe it is not merely unhappiness or my hatred for Caledu. I know that a battle has begun in me, and that, all the same, I will have to make a choice one day. What vocation calls me? How would I understand and follow the call? I am still rebellious. Just seeing Dora makes my blood boil, and not too long ago when the mayor shook my hand after mass, I almost laughed in his face.

“He is a joke, our little mayor,” Mme Camuse muttered in my ear that day. “He looks like a cheap sausage stuffed into that wool jacket. Look at the prefect’s wife! She’s got four bracelets on her fat arms and has hung a couple of chandeliers from her ears. Does she think she’s at a ball?”

She has kept her aristocratic lexicon. She’s not about to change at seventy-five. The sight of the Cercle occupied by armed beggars made her heartsick.

“They have taken over everything!” she groans. “Ah! Our good old days are really good and gone!”

There was a time when she ruled our district in high style, when she made her servants beat the drum and light the flame, when she organized cocktail parties at l’Etoile, when she presided at table opposite her late husband, who was dressed in his most elegant frock coat, when she angrily scratched out from the guest list names that were outrageously nouveau riche. Her time is no more. Annette and her peers have resigned themselves to this. Mme Camuse and Mme Audier think Annette is little more than a hussy. “A hussy,” they murmur to each other in the intimacy of their living room now sullied by the boots of Commandant Caledu and by the exceedingly shiny new shoes of the mayor and the prefect. It’s a cold war of resentment, rancor and hatred.

***

This morning, I brought Felicia her soup. Her belly is spilling out of her maternity blouse: a veritable sperm whale!

“Claire, my dearest,” she said to me, “Jean and I have chosen you to be godmother to our son.”

I smile and thank her. In my own fashion.

“Are you happy?”

“Of course I’m happy.”

I don’t want a child who is only a quarter mine. I want one who is completely mine. I don’t want to get attached to other people’s children. Even though life has denied me everything, I am not inclined to play the adoptive mother. I may kiss Jane’s son on his nice round cheeks but I remain detached, the door to my heart as solidly barricaded as the door to my bedroom.

Dr. Audier will be the godfather, naturally. He has served as witness to every wedding and stood godfather to every child born to the decent families, more or less. I will have a pleasant fellow godparent. A good guy, this doctor, who, despite his time in Paris, remained a classic Haitian country doctor to the core. He still forgets to tie his shoes and close his fly. Always a wet cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth; one time, by accident, some ash fell on Felicia’s belly. He’s the doctor the Luzes trusts, just as he was the one we trusted in the old days. In any case, we are hardly overwhelmed with options. And isn’t a doctor who studied in France something like a specialist? He continues to visit us every eight days, accompanied by his wife always caked in powder whiter than Pierrot. Does she still get her Antiphelic Milk [15] by the case from Paris? No, for the French ships have deserted our ports. “My God,” she would moan coyly, “my complexion is getting darker!”… She is all honey when she talks to the prefect and all honey with Caledu as well. “Commandant,” she once said to him, “the uniform really suits you.”

For the moment, she feels obliged to moan like a polecat over the layette of the expected newborn.

Jean Luze chats with Dr. Audier. They dredge up memories of Paris. How and when the conversation turns, I can’t say. I only hear Dr. Audier answer:

“Yes, I am taking care of Dora Soubiran just as I have taken care of all the women beaten by Caledu. I suspect we’re dealing with a sadist who is avenging himself for his impotence with women. At least that’s my suspicion, because he’s also a bitter man who may simply be punishing others for their social status. His choice of victims reveals that much.”

“Why not complain?” Jean Luze asks.

“To whom?” Audier replies. “To the people who sent him to purge this town?”

“But how is it possible that there’s nothing you can do!”

“So you still don’t get it,” Dr. Audier said with despair. “People are right to say that no matter how educated they may be, foreigners can barely understand us even if they watch how we live for a hundred years.”

“I think I’ve understood quite a few things,” Jean Luze replies smiling, “but what astonishes and disgusts me a little, I confess, is the well-behaved fatalism with which you pull down your breeches for the lash. I see around me neither revolt nor even the semblance of revolt, nothing that would show your discontent.”

“You are wrong. This region is caught in the line of terror. But maybe this is just for the time being. We Haitians have earned our independence in a way few nations can boast. We are still a very young nation. Maybe we find it normal to take the lash, as you say, from time to time. The response will come. In good time, it will come, believe me…”

“I won’t be around for that, unfortunately.”

“You”-Dr. Audier shook his finger at him-“the Export Corporation isn’t keeping you on.”

“My contract expires in three months. I’ve saved up quite a bit…”

He mops the sweat from his brow and smiles.

“I am going to lose it, I know it.”

Felicia looks at him without a word.

She will accept whatever he wishes. She, too, would follow him to the ends of the earth.