In the midst of this squalor, the prefect lives in style in his villa. He does not earn much, but he is rich.
“The good Lord has punished you,” he sighs when beggars hold out their hands.
“The good Lord is unhappy with you,” Father Paul echoes from his pulpit. “You are giving in to superstition. You practice voodoo. God has punished you.”
In the thirty years he has lived in this country and fought this religion, he hasn’t yet understood that nothing will ever uproot it. In order not to believe in it, in order not to seek the protection of the gods, one has to free oneself once and for all of everything, one has to shake the yoke of any divinity and count only on one’s own strength. Which I have done. But how can you stop this ignorant people from clinging to something they see as a life raft, when even its representatives, when even my own father, the Parisian mulatto, served his
My door is double-locked and I keep a key in my pocket. I do not let anyone in, not even my sisters. Still, just in case, I have hidden under my bed the romance novels I devour and the pornographic postcards sold to me one night on a deserted street corner by a suspicious young man with glasses, who was freshly arrived from Port-au-Prince and who fortunately vanished without a trace.
There is no such thing as purity, and the needs of the flesh are normal. Can anyone live without eating or drinking? I twist on my bed, prey to desires that nothing slakes. I close my bedroom window and make sure that my door is locked and take off my clothes. I am naked, in the mirror still beautiful. But my face is withered. I have bags under my eyes and wrinkles on my forehead. The graceless face of a love-starved old maid. I hate Felicia for having brought this man home. My temptation. My awful and delicious temptation! When they leave the bedroom, I go and touch, I smell the sheets on which they made love, starving for this smell of seaweed mixed with male sweat, which must be the smell of sperm and which blends with Felicia’s bland perfume.
Annette no longer has Bob Charivi drive her home. Rain or shine, she walks home. It is a tactic like any other, designed to move Jean Luze. I concur with this tactic. I want Annette to be Jean Luze’s. I want her to take Felicia’s place in that man’s life. I don’t like Felicia. She is too white, too blond, too lukewarm, too orderly. Ah! If only I had Annette’s youth. As I am, I would never dare. I only have to look at my face, prematurely aged, to withdraw immediately. A wasted face! I blame it on frustration, for which I reproach myself. Why did Jean Luze choose Felicia?
I remember his arrival in this country, one morning last year around this time. A rented car, covered in mud and dust, with a black driver behind the wheel, stopped in front of our house by chance. All the shutters lifted at once and the newcomers fell under the scrutiny of the curious eyes behind our yellowed and dusty lace curtains. I was sweeping the porch. He opened his door and walked up to me. Did he take me for the maid? He barely greeted me and asked where he could find the office of M. Long, the American, the director of the Export Corporation; I pointed it out to him. Later on when he returned for a visit with Dr. Audier, who explained that M. Luze had come here with the intention of collaborating with the Export Corporation, Annette made arrangements to seduce him. As for me, he hardly seemed to notice me. Only when Dr. Audier said, “May I introduce you to the Clamont girls?” did I see him fix his eyes upon me in astonishment. In that moment all the complexes, of which I had thought myself to be definitively cured, were roused in me. His amused gaze took in the living room, grazed Annette, and stopped on Felicia. She looked up at him with eyes full of fright and admiration, as she beheld him with parted lips. I think I loved him from the very first minute. Unfortunately, I was too practiced in the art of deception, and behind my mask of detachment, I burned in silence like a torch. Rigid, stuffy, suspicious like a cop, I would make the most resourceful prospects run away. Even long before, with Frantz Camuse and Justin Rollier, two acceptable suitors, I was unable to react. True, at that time I would shrink because I was self-conscious about my dark skin, which our acquaintances hypocritically pretended was a most unusual phenomenon.
“She is so different from her sisters!” “Who does she look like?” But under their breath, they added: “This one really fell off the oven rack.”
Furthermore, I imagined sexual relations, caresses, even kisses, to be shameful acts that only the Church could absolve through the sacrament of marriage. Raised on absurd primers that drilled it into me, throughout my entire youth, that love is a sin, cloistered in this house, in this town which I had only left twice to go to Port-au-Prince escorted by my parents, I lived surrounded by people for the most part no more enlightened than my tutors. Shamefaced, I learned to repress my instincts. Any intimacy with those who did not belong to the highest level of society meant dishonor for my parents. Their narrow-mindedness influenced me to such an extent that the only people who existed as far as I was concerned were those we received at home. My mother avoided greeting any woman suspected of adultery, while my father found all women depraved. He was a womanizer, so he knew what he was talking about. To please such parents, you had to live like a recluse so as to escape malicious gossip, which was as damning in their eyes as the fault itself.
I understood a bit late that the act of love is like any other physiological need of a human being. Just as late, I realized the stupidity of social classifications based on wealth and color. I became skilled at unmasking the social climbers, the hypocrites, guessing that behind their saintly little airs these artists spun the most elaborate embroideries of copulation. I have fun imagining such and such a couple going at it. And they appear to me either ridiculous or deliciously titillating, depending on whether their coupling seems grotesque or gracious.
The shade from the trees creates a refreshing oasis under my window. I see Jean Luze and Annette come in. He brought her home today. And Felicia welcomes them with open arms. She threw up five times today, she tells her husband as he kisses her absentmindedly The smell of the food on the table drives her away. I am the one who serves Jean Luze. He eats slowly, keeping his eyes on his plate. Annette laughs because he almost spilled his drink. Her laughter rings like a chime on crystal, and her eyes, slanted like butterfly wings, shine as brightly as her teeth. This is torture for Jean Luze. He excuses himself and gets up. She calls him back to ask for a cigarette. The way she pronounces his name! Like a song on her lips. She pauses on its one-syllable note and holds it. She looks into his eyes as she lifts her cigarette to his lighter.
“Thank you, Jean.”
“You’re welcome.”
The tone is polite but it reveals a bad mood thinly veiled.
“You seem upset.”
“Me?”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing at all.”
She goes up to the living room, puts a record on the turntable and starts dancing by herself. The needle squeaks.
“I beg of you, don’t damage my equipment.”
He is watching her without paying any attention to me.
A crowd gathers in the street: speculators, traders, farmers, managers, wholesale dealers and retailers grab each other by the collar and seem ready to eat each other alive. The noise is deafening. They accuse each other. Each blames the other for his losses or his ruin. How careless. Have they forgotten about the commandant and his men ensconced at the Cercle? They will pick them up tonight with nary a word, simply accusing them of subversive activities. Jean Luze is standing near me by the dining room door, which opens onto the porch. We look on.
“What’s the matter with them?” he asks me.
“They’re fighting.”
“As usual. And the tragedy is that no one seems to understand the real problem.”
He has an ironic little laugh, almost silent.
In one booth, a scale once used to weigh coffee sways like a cripple. Piles of sacks lie empty on the ground, a few coffee beans scattered around. Some beggars run toward us with their hands out. Jean Luze winces in disgust.
“It’s awful!” he says.
And really, they do stink.
A cop pulls apart these growling dogs and beats the more stubborn ones. A beggar in rags with a face devoured by hunger looks at us furtively.
“They are getting their heads bashed on top of it,” Jean Luze mutters through clenched teeth.
He has already learned to be cautious.
The beggar raises his arm to scratch his head and reveals a gun, secured to his waist by a rope.
