A few words about our process: When asked how Val and I divide the labor of translating, I often respond: we take turns. When I defend the original, he defends the translation. When he defends the translation, I defend the original. This is still my best answer.-R.M.R.
TRANSLATORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to express our gratitude to the following people and institutions for their support of this translation: Judy Sternlight, Edwidge Danticat, Regine Charlier, Thomas Colchie, Thomas Spear, Holly Webber, Michael Dash, Joan Dayan, Ronnie Scharfman, Carolyn Vega, Jeanne Garane, Emmanuelle Ertel, Etienne Dobenesque, Alyson Waters, Patrick Erouart-Siad, Margo Jefferson, Jonathan Veitch, Neil Gordon, Noah Eisenberg, Carolyn Berman, Laura Frost, Lea Beresford, Vincent La Scala, Ann Snitow, Ferentz Lafargue, Elaine Savory, John Flicker, Jessica Waters, Exit Art, and the Simon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORKS BY MARIE VIEUX-CHAUVET PUBLISHED UNDER THE NAME MARIE CHAUVET
Guyonneau, Christine H. “Francophone Women Writers from Sub-Saharan Africa and Its Diaspora: A Preliminary Bibliography.”
“Marie Chauvet.” http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile.en.ile/paroles/chauvet.html [accessed January 2009].
LOVE
Quietly, like a shadow, I watch this drama unfold scene by scene. I am the lucid one here, the dangerous one, and nobody suspects. An old maid! No husband. Doesn’t know love. Hasn’t even lived, really. They’re wrong. In any case, I’m savoring my revenge in silence. Silence is mine, vengeance is mine. I know into whose arms Annette will throw herself, and under no circumstances do I plan to open the eyes of our sister Felicia. She is too enraptured and carries the three-month-old fetus in her womb with too much pride. If she was smart enough to find herself a husband, I want her to be smart enough to keep him. She has too much confidence-in herself, in everyone. Her serenity exasperates me. She smiles while sewing shirts for the son she’s expecting, because of course it must be a son! And Annette will be the godmother, I bet…
I rest my elbows on the bedroom windowsill, and watch: standing in broad daylight, Annette offers Jean Luze the freshness of her twenty-two years. Their backs to Felicia, they claim each other without the slightest gesture. Desire bursting in their eyes. Jean Luze struggles, but there is no way out.
I am thirty-nine years old and still a virgin. The unenviable fate of most women in small Haitian towns. Is it like that everywhere? Are there towns in the world like this one, half mired in ancestral habits, people spying on each other? My town! My land! as they proudly call this dreary graveyard, where you see few men besides the doctor, the pharmacist, the priest, the district commandant, the mayor, the prefect, all of them newly appointed to their posts, all of them such typical “coast people” that it’s nauseating. Suitors are exotic birds, since parents here always dream of sending their sons away to Port-au-Prince or abroad to make learned men of them. One of them came back to us in the person of Dr. Audier, who studied in Paris and in whom I still search in vain for something superhuman…
I was born in 1900, a time when prejudice was at its height in this little region. Three groups emerged, isolated from each other like enemies: the “aristocrats” to whom we belonged, the petty bourgeois, and the common people. Tugged at by the delicate ambiguity of my situation, I suffered from an early age because of the dark color of my skin. The mahogany color I had inherited from some great-great-grandmother went off like a small bomb in the tight circle of whites and white-mulattoes with whom my parents socialized. But that is the past, and I don’t care to return to what is no more, at least not for now…
Father Paul says I have poisoned my mind with education. The truth is that my wits were asleep and I have stirred them-with this journal. I have discovered in myself unsuspected talents. I believe I can write. I believe I can think. I have become arrogant. I have become self-conscious. To reduce my inner life to what the eye can see, that’s my goal. A noble task! Will I succeed? To speak of myself is easy. All I have to do is lie a lot while convincing myself that I’m really putting my finger on it. I will attempt sincerity: solitude has made me bitter; I am like a fruit fallen before ripening, rotting under the tree unnoticed. Hurrah for Annette! After Justin Rollier, the poet who died of tuberculosis, there was Bob the Syrian; after Bob now Jean, brother-in-law to us both-and she is not yet twenty- three. Our little town of X is emancipating itself. It would seem we have been contaminated by what they call civilization.
I am the oldest of the three Clamont sisters. There are about eight years in age between each of us. We live together in this house, an undivided inheritance from our late parents. As usual, I have been entrusted with the more vexing tasks.
Felicia shrugs.
Since she got married, only Jean Luze exists. Gorgeous Jean Luze! Brilliant Jean Luze! The exotic and mysterious foreigner, who has set up his library and record collection in our house, and makes fun of our backward way of living and thinking. A flawless man, an ideal husband. Felicia’s cup overfloweth with love and admiration. I won’t be the one to open her eyes. From my window, I spy on their every move. This is how I came to find Annette
