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!”
Felicia 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 Felicia’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 Felicia’s eyes.
“Well, I assume that’s never happened to you,” she says weakly.
“It did, once.”
Felicia’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,” Felicia 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 trees 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 Caledu, 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. Eugenie 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 Felicia 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. Felicia 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?”
Felicia’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 Felicia. 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.”
Felicia 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.”
“Felicia 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 Baviere.”
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
