Love, Anger, Madness

The labor was turning out to be difficult. I stayed by Felicia’s bedside until six in the morning. Jean Luze was so nervous that he was not able to eat anything. Annette suddenly started acting mysteriously. I can’t tell if something’s happened between them.

Before my eyes my sister’s body was drawn and quartered. She was moaning and screaming as I patiently wiped her forehead.

“Claire! Claire!” she cried, hanging on to me.

Toward seven o’clock, she let loose an awful hoarse scream, and Dr. Audier, leaning in, cigarette at the corner of his mouth, welcomed the child onto the great mahogany bed where my mother had given birth to her three daughters in his care.

“It’s a boy” he told me.

He was so ugly I was sure I could never love him.

“And Felicia?” Jean Luze asked, opening the bedroom door.

“Everything went well,” Dr. Audier replied. “Wait a little before coming in.”

The child breathed feebly, half-purple. The doctor slapped his bottom and plunged him in warm water. He wriggled, then screamed.

“Give me some cotton, Claire,” Audier said to me. “I need a lot of cotton.”

He made him lie on a thick layer of cotton bedding and wrapped him in a blanket.

“He’s small,” he added, “keeping him warm will help.”

***

The news about the baby is alarming. Audier can’t promise anything. Felicia of course knows nothing. She is more serene than ever, patiently drawing milk from her swollen breasts with a pump. She got up today for the first time, doctor’s orders, and she took a few steps around the room. Jean Luze forces himself to smile for her. Fortunately, she’s noticed nothing! What a temperament! She’s stuffed with straw. She’s a scarecrow. I know this man’s every expression and can predict every reaction. How can she not sense his mortal fear? She eats with great appetite while he barely touches anything, though I myself take the trouble to prepare his favorite food. For him, Annette is as nonexistent as I am. He doesn’t even see her anymore. He lives in perpetual anguish, an anguish so overwhelming that it steals him away from me. He doesn’t even listen to music. He doesn’t care for anything. Yesterday, when he was in the living room smoking a pipe, I went in on tiptoes to put a Beethoven concerto on the turntable. He hardly listened for a minute, before getting up to worry over the baby still swaddled in cotton and more ugly than a little monkey.

Being spurned is making Annette sick. She seems to suffer as much as I do. She worries me. I forced her to live too intensely. She is not used to suffering and it has torn her apart: she looks like a madwoman in her eccentric dresses and her excessive makeup. She doesn’t eat anymore. Jean Luze doesn’t even seem to notice her absence at the dinner table. The tension is straining my nerves. Does his whole world consist of Felicia and the little runt she gave birth to?

There are guests in the living room. Eugenie Duclan and her pharmacist are among them. It so happens I have a prescription from Dr. Audier for Felicia. I give it to Charles Farus, who adjusts his glasses to decipher it. He shakes his head: no, he doesn’t have this medicine; it will have to be sent for from Port-au-Prince. Then what’s the use of your pharmacy? I want to scream at him. There they are, just about all of them, and all anxious to find out whether Felicia is dead or alive, how big the baby is. It’s obvious they are seeking entertainment and especially gossip. One can tell by their faces. They must be counting months, figuring out the dates. Jean Luze tries his best to be pleasant. They seem intimidated and even flattered to be shaking his hand. An inferiority complex? A foreigner has always represented the height of perfection in our eyes. He has always had the reputation of being rich, happy, knowing everything better than us. He opens our eyes on new horizons and unveils a mysterious, unknown world to us.

Eugenie Duclan offers her arm to the partly arthritic Charles Farus. Things do seem to be going swell for them. I have a feeling that soon we will see this forty-year-old sister go down the church aisle with this pharmacist, who, thanks to illness and old age, will end up using her as a nurse at the store.

“So, the news is good?” Eugenie insists.

“The news is good,” Jean Luze affirms.

“God be praised!”

“God be praised!” he acquiesces, imperturbable.

She is dressed in a starched skirt that makes her look like a puffed-up turkey. He is wearing a greenish alpaca suit and is clutching a grimy panama hat.

“Oh for the love of God,” Jean Luze sighs after their departure. “It’s like they stepped out of a painting from another century.”

That makes me smile.

Then, Mme Camuse comes. She disregards the doctor’s orders and walks right into the Luzes’ room without even a present in her hand.

“You! You, Felicia Clamont, my own goddaughter! I would have never thought! Madame Audier has taken it upon herself to spread the news that you got married pregnant, my girl.”

“What does it matter, godmother,” she responds, “as long as I am married?” And she exchanges a complicit little smile with her husband that would have made a saint green with envy.

Audier has reassured us. The baby will make it. He finally took him out of his cotton cocoon. Jean Luze calmed down a bit. My nerves loosened, otherwise they might have snapped.

Unfortunately, that’s when Annette decided to try to commit suicide.

That evening, when I opened her door, I found her deep in sleep, moaning as if she was in pain. I called Jean Luze and without saying anything, pointed to the empty bottle of sleeping pills. He frowned and bent over her, taking Annette’s head in his hands. Her magnificent black hair ran through his fingers unnoticed.

“What have you done? What have you done now, for God’s sake,” he cried out.

He patted her face clumsily, and then turned to me:

“I’m going to get Dr. Audier,” he told me.

He let her head fall just as clumsily and left running.

Upon his return, he stopped briefly in the living room to talk to Audier. He whispered something I didn’t hear. I then heard the doctor’s voice very clearly.

“These kinds of girls, you know, take nothing seriously; life is all theater for them.”

“Yes, but I can’t stand these cracked-up women living only by their feelings,” Jean Luze replied. “Isn’t there a way to calm them down, to fix them? Surely there must be an appropriate treatment…”

“As long as they accept treatment, yes, one can help them: nymphomania can be treated. All you need is the patient’s cooperation.”

The tone with which Dr. Audier uttered his last words was worse than an insult. He followed us into Annette’s room, took the empty bottle that Jean Luze handed to him, looked at it for a moment and then put it on the table:

“I’m going to pump her stomach,” he said.

He roughly pried her teeth open with a spoon, opened her mouth and pushed a long tube down her throat. She hiccuped, coughed up blood and then vomit.

“Help me, Claire,” he ordered.

I shook with rage and apprehension. She’s solid as a rock, I said to myself. I was looking at Jean Luze’s unhappy face and felt as if I had climbed to the blazing peaks only to crash to the ground, every bone broken.

An icy wind dried the sweat on my brow. If Annette left him cold, how can I hope to move him? I told myself. He’s strong, and the strong are without pity even toward themselves.

A man shapes his desire according to his woman, and thus loves her only as much as he respects her, I told myself in consolation. So reasoning, I quickly realized then that Annette could never have inspired anything lasting in him.

“Is she better?” he asked Dr. Audier.