Love, Anger, Madness

voice, in sharp contrast to the old man’s mute nervousness and the young man’s more exuberant manner. The grandfather looked from his son to his grandson. While the silence lasted, he kept staring at them with such insistence that a casual observer might have thought him senile.

“Evil has come upon us. We will have to fight to defeat it,” he finally said.

“Above all, we’ll have to act with caution,” replied the father, who had been waiting for the maid to leave before breaking his silence. “We’ll get a very good and very clever lawyer who knows how to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and we’ll need to follow his advice to the letter.”

“And if he declares, as I predict he will, that it’s a lost cause and that we have to accept this?” the grandfather asked.

“Well, then we’ll have to accept it.”

“I will never abandon my land to these thieves,” the grandfather yelled, walking toward his son, who quickly jumped to close the door. “My father sweated to acquire it, and I will not abandon my land to these thieves.”

He regained his composure with difficulty, pricking up his ears despite himself.

One could no longer hear the hammering. This unexpected silence coming from outside, as if in response to his anger, seemed so ominous to the old man that he pressed both hands on the table, bending his spine as if threatened by some immediate danger. The grandson crossed his arms, and knitting his brows, looked at his father; the latter seemed to have gone beyond plain fear. Huddled up, every muscle tense, he looked like a lion tamer locked in a cage with wild beasts and expecting to see them pounce and tear him to shreds at any moment.

“If they come, especially if they heard us, you’ll have to keep quiet and let me do the talking,” he begged in a voice so low that he could hardly be heard.

He clenched his teeth and the muscles of his face tightened.

The three of them stood like that for a long time. Then the young man looked away from his father, lifted his shoulders and walked to the door, opening it a second time.

“They haven’t moved,” he said with forced casualness.

And he sat at the table for breakfast. He pushed away the omelet that Melie had prepared and poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Maybe, like my father said, we’ll have to accept it,” he said.

Hearing these words, the grandfather, his eyes bloodshot, left the table and went out on the porch. Thumbs in his suspenders, he paced up and down for a long time, then stopped, suddenly slouching: all around him stood the houses of the neighborhood, that old quarter of Port-au-Prince where he had grown up in comfort thanks to his father, a peasant who had managed to make it in the bigoted world of bourgeois blacks and mulattoes by dint of honest and sheer tenacity. He earned his position by the sweat of his brow, as the grandfather loved to declare to his son and grandson, and their name was respected to this day. A farmer from the market town of Cavaillon, the old patriarch-intelligent, crafty, tireless in his task-dreamed of a different life for his son. This house, this “big-house” as he called it in Creole, had been built at the end of Lysius Salomon’s rule, [28] and while everyone was finding their way into the troubled waters of politics, he had remained steadfastly committed to his business. During the 1887 currency adjustment that linked the Haitian gourde to the American dollar, he was able to accumulate a small fortune.

The colonial-style wooden house looked like all the established houses in the neighborhood. Rising up between courtyard and garden, they were decked with railed balconies and hat-shaped gables, and stood in the midst of sprawling properties planted mostly with fruit trees, mahogany and oak. Here and there, a few modern buildings lay flat and square at their feet, their scale limited by lack of land. Looking at them, the grandfather began to regret not having sold his properties, as others did, to the nouveaux riches and given the money to his children.

Humiliated by his father, a true Haitian black man who insisted on serving his loas [29] faithfully he had renounced the religious vocation he had been drawn to very early on. Once he was orphaned, he had also refused to rent the house, refused to leave the neighborhood, though he had no income to live on. After all, who else would take care of his father’s grave? For forty years, he had made do with the income from the sale of his fruit to the local peddlers who would come around to haggle with him.

Every day during harvest, he went to the garden and paid a few young black men to climb up the trees with sacks on their backs. Down came coconuts lopped off by machetes at the stem, and from furiously shaken branches the most lovely mangoes in the country rained down, and in this fashion he earned enough to condescend to accept the fifty gourdes [30] the peddlers gave him each month.

The stakes planted thirty meters from the house plainly separated it from the land-encircled it, in other words. Now the porch was the only means of egress. The grandfather thought he could see a whole host of dark silhouettes under the oaks and he nervously searched his pockets for his glasses. But there was nothing moving save the leafy branches of the trees on their hundred-year-old trunks. The freshly whitewashed grave of the ancestor stood out under the green of the lemon trees he had planted himself. Being a stubborn and superstitious peasant, he had demanded to be buried in that spot, swearing to look after his lands in death as well as he had while he was alive. And his son, who was only twenty then, could do nothing but obey.

“I will get him out of his grave,” the grandfather whispered. “I will get him out of his grave.” And angrily he began to pull on his wiry goatee.

Across the street, in a newer-looking house with stone walls and picture windows, he saw his friend Jacob, a Syrian who got rich quick selling American fabric. At dawn he had already caught him watching from behind the shutters, and he chased away an unpleasant thought that had been running through his mind from the moment he stepped on the porch. He guessed he was being watched by many eyes and he feigned indifference, walking around as casually as he did every morning, trying not to look at the houses next door. He returned to the dining room where his son’s wife, a light-skinned mulatto woman, had in the meantime come down and was eating. He sat down across from her in silence, crossed himself and mumbled a prayer.

“Claude isn’t up?” she asked him.

At that very moment, a sulky young voice called for help. The grandfather, pushing away his chair, went up the stairs and returned carrying a scrawny eight-year-old child with a pale yellow face and two immense, burning black eyes. A young woman, putting the last touches to her outfit, followed them. The grandfather had the child sit while the young woman served herself cafe au lait and drank it standing. She was a brunette with long thick hair that curled up around her head and fell back in a ponytail on the nape of her neck. Her dark skin gleamed gold in parts of her face, especially the cheeks, which made it seem like discreet makeup.

“Sit down, Rose,” her mother said.

Paul was watching her lap up the melted sugar in her cup and thought she looked like a pretty cat with its face deep in a dish.

She’s thin and fetching. Only a black woman can manage to be both thin and fetching: must have something to do with the shape of her rear end, he told himself. And he remembered how she had slapped his rich and smug friend Fred for having tried to kiss her. Thin, fetching without knowing it, but serious. Probably not an easy girl, he thought again. And he looked away from her, not without a feeling of pride.

“In the name of the Father, the Son,” the grandfather began again for the child. “Let us pray that God spares us and let us ask Him to inspire us so we may defeat the evil within us and around us.”

And as he spoke, his gaze rested on his daughter-in-law, who visibly avoided it.

“Eat, Claude,” she said to the child.

Breaking off some bread, she gave him some.

“Let me be, Mama, I’m not a baby anymore,” he protested impatiently.

And he smiled at the grandfather who treated him like a man.

“You promised me a story,” he said to him.

“Have I ever been untrue to my word?” the grandfather asked him.

The boy spilled a little coffee on himself, and the mother quickly wiped his mouth.

“Be careful, sweetie.”

“I am not a girl, only girls are called sweetie,” he retorted without mercy.

“Fine. From now on I will only call you Claude.”