to him abruptly.
Again I found myself across from M. Trudor, who was about to speak, surrounded by guests straining their necks to get a good look at the newlyweds.
If the speech was dismal, fortunately there were too few of us to notice.
Jean Luze made me his partner in crime, winking at me with an amused smile, as if I were colluding with him in witnessing this disaster.
Another sleepless night, thanks to Caledu. I’m angry with myself for having trembled before him. I have no other choice but to curb my hatred if I want to decipher the frightful expression on his face. It took some doing, but I managed to chase him from my thoughts.
How empty the house feels without Annette! You might think you were in a funeral parlor. No more dance music, no more peals of laughter, no more stormy exits. We eat lunch in silence, Jean Luze, Felicia and I. I do the laundry as before, wash Jean-Claude’s bottles and look after Felicia. Am I regaining confidence in myself? To what should I attribute this sudden joie de vivre that has me flinging open the window, drawing deep breaths of the cool morning air into my diaphragm, then closing my eyes and throwing myself across my bed with arms splayed like a cross? So luxurious to lose oneself in a dream-world where one lives only for oneself! Floodgates opened, barriers collapsed, shackles broken, I am now joyfully bounding toward freedom. Just me, face to face with myself, with no one around. Will I die without knowing the firm embrace of a man? There comes a time when virginity seems indecent. Has my upbringing so marked me that it seems out of the question to satisfy my needs in an irregular way?
Annette showed up with Paul eight days after the wedding. We were having lunch. She came in running and kissed us with exclamations of gaiety and joy.
“Felicia, my poor dear! You don’t look so good.”
This is turning into persecution.
Without waiting for Felicia to respond, she rushes to the crib and returns with Jean-Claude, whom she simply woke up.
“Look, Paul darling, he’s so adorable!”
She devoured his cheeks with kisses before finally putting him back on his mother’s lap.
A mad dash to the pantry where she likewise kisses a grumpy Augustine, another mad dash into the living room where a swinging tune soon fills the air. The house is alive again!
“Has anyone here missed me at least?”
She sighs without giving us time to answer:
“Unfortunately, we have to go,” she adds, “some friends are expecting us. Did you see my tan? I live on the beach. Fortunately, this awful old-fashioned paleness is going away…”
She’s gone now. She waves one more time from the car. Her smile cuts dimples in her golden cheeks.
“It’s death here without Mademoiselle Annette,” Augustine suddenly blurts out.
She has dared to say what perhaps all of us were thinking, for habit indeed creates ties and even the most shallow human being leaves behind a void.
Irreproachable as he is toward his wife, the feeling he has for her, is that love? He lacks the spark, the joy the lightheartedness that love brings. Am I fooling myself? I still love him-that is, if love means melting with pleasure at the slightest movement of his hand, if it is unreserved admiration, or sharing common tastes in secret but not daring to give oneself away by speaking of them. How much longer will I be prey to this sterile passion? Am I going to settle for mind games for the rest of my life? I complicate things and, like a masochist, invent a thousand ways to torture myself. Idiot that I am, I did nothing with my youth, when naivete lends self-confidence. I know too much now to lie to myself without revulsion. I know, for example, that only suffering would lead him to me. How love can make one cruel and sadistic! Am I not just like these torturers? I have suffered too much. It’s time for a truce. I will find it in a different way of life. Platonic love is a myth. Only freaks can settle for that. My love is full-bodied: it’s a nice mixture of sexual drive and lofty sentiment. Just what is necessary not to frighten the respectable woman I am.
I throw myself on my bed and wrap my arms around Jean Luze. I feel the weight of his body on mine. My dry lips always return me to my solitude. Alas, I am alone, alone. More and more I have come to hate these meager compensations, these proofs of my cowardice. Why aren’t you alone, too, Jean Luze? Why aren’t you free? I banish Felicia from my mind. Now I am really turning into a criminal! I am terrorizing myself. A long scream startles me. Someone is calling for help in the dark. I run to the window. I hear the clatter of weapons and a woman cry out. I imagine my neighbors, ears pricked up, trembling and listening like me, just as I imagine the woman in handcuffs being led away by Caledu. I press myself against the wall and open the window a crack. I can’t hear or see anything anymore. Everything has fallen into a kind of deathly silence. I’m surprised at the trembling of my hands and at my heaving rage. What does this have to do with me? And yet, I had the definite impression that, for a minute, I was prey to a dangerous and unbidden thought, one that I shook off willingly. The thought crosses my mind again in a flash. A flash of lightning flying like a dagger from my head, shining before my eyes like a sign. I hide my face in my hands and try to banish this terrible vision by sinking voluptuously into memories of the past.
Can that be me, the little girl hopping on one foot in the stairwell, with beaming eyes and joy in her heart? How old am I? Six, seven years old. All of that is so far away now. My first memories go back to those days. Before that I don’t exist. Suffering is the revelation that makes you aware of yourself. There must be some extraordinary significance to that age because that was when my parents became strict and suspicious toward me. I was reprimanded for no reason, spitefully watched. My mother put sewing work in my hands, and I spent most of my time sitting on a low chair at her feet. Every day my father called for me in a gruff voice to make me repeat my lessons, and pinched my ear hard enough to draw blood for the smallest error. “It clears the mind,” he would say to reassure me about his meanness.
To toughen me and perhaps to punish me for his disappointed paternal hopes, he decided to raise me as if I were a boy. Every morning, he would ask for his horse and put me in the saddle. I screamed the first time, frightening the stable hand Demosthenes, an old black man who was enslaved by his meager wages and who trembled before my father. I fell the second time. Demosthenes picked me up, and my father told him:
“Put her back on the horse.”
Crying, I clung to his neck.
“Put her back in the saddle,” my father screamed.
The poor man had to obey.
I fell again and Demosthenes grabbed me in his arms and ran to the house.
“Madame,” he said to my mother. “He’s going to kill your little girl.”
My father came to get me. He struck Demosthenes, angrily tore me from my mother’s arms and stood me in front of the animal.
“He’s not going to do anything to you,” he said, “look!”
He put my frozen hand on the horse’s muzzle, sat me back in the saddle and whipped his rump.
I screamed in terror, and then stiffened my legs and thighs around the horse’s warm belly. A month later, he galloped with me beneath the trees in the courtyard.
While waiting to be dispatched to France, I spent my time with other daughters from bourgeois families at the Ecole Nationale of the French sisters, whose mother superior was a friend of my mother’s. This meant I was watched closely. At home, it fell to my father to make me do my work. Every day I was punished for the blots in my notebook. The punishment consisted of kneeling with arms crossed, chin up, next to my father. Eyes closed, trembling with fatigue, I would wait for the “get up” that signaled an end to my torment. Sometimes I would cry, and then the punishment lasted much longer.
Twice a week, from my room I heard my father yell orders to the servants and gallop away to Lion Mountain, which is what they called the six hundred acres planted with coffee, from which he extracted our prosperity. My father, very proud of his coffee, bragged about having studied agronomy in France and, unlike the other planters, personally watched over his field hands.
When I turned ten he gave me my own horse, which I promptly named Bon Ami, perhaps foreseeing the moral solitude that awaited me.
People tended to keep to themselves. When we did have guests, and this was rare, our living room would open to the Grandupres, Bavieres, Soubirans, Duclans, Camuses, Audiers, M. Prelat, a French merchant set up on Grand- rue, French ship captains and crew, and all the best society from Port-au-Prince, always received in the French style
