It’s one of Commandant Caledu’s spies. The police chief is known to be a sadist. He loves to whip women, and once in a while he has them arrested just like that, one or two at a time for his pleasure.
With my own eyes I have seen Dora Soubiran, my childhood friend and our neighbor, walk out of jail after being accused of sedition. She is a completely harmless zealot who insists-perversely or not-that God is her only supreme leader. Caledu loves to be feared and to be shown that he is feared. Especially when the one in question is Dora Soubiran, scion of the late Cesar Soubiran, former director of the lycee, schooled in Paris, former parliamentarian, who served as an ambassador in previous administrations. Dora Soubiran looks down her nose at him. She refuses to understand the march of history, its twists and reversals. So one evening, he came to get her himself. She followed him down the street, saying her rosary as people lay low in the dark behind their half-opened shutters. She came back two days later, haggard and unrecognizable, followed by the taunts of the beggars roaring with laughter to see her walk with open legs like a cripple. We hear her sob at night. No one dares rescue her. She’s a suspect. One of those who has been marked by Caledu, a man chosen expressly by the police to tame this little town famous for its arrogance and prejudices.
In three days it will be my birthday and they want to throw me a party. I don’t care for it. I have no interest in being on display. I’ll still make a cake, so no one will say that I’m a cheapskate… “A chocolate cake,” Annette adds with a comically avid expression, “just like you know how to make.” Yes, but where will I find the chocolate? Well, she’s going to have to make do with what’s on the table. She is brimming with life. She must be temptation itself for Jean Luze. He eyes her greedily, unwittingly. With every subtle movement, her long legs trace riveting arabesques. His courage and will are wearing thin. Felicia has not left her room in two days. They must feel as if they’re alone, more uninhibited. Is Annette really going to overcome Jean Luze’s resistance? He often gives her these long looks that make me tremble. Maybe I’m getting more out of all that he gives her. I’m getting more than she is. What a miracle!
“Monsieur Long gave me two bottles of whiskey,” Jean Luze announces. “I’ll invite him to the party.”
“Fine,” nods Felicia.
“What about the commandant?” Annette asks.
“No,” I protest forcefully.
“Oh! You know,” she says coldly, “we are no longer living in the days of our dear parents. Prejudice is out of fashion.”
“This has nothing to do with prejudice,” I reply.
“We should still have him over once in a while,” prudent Felicia adds cautiously. “What good would it do to turn him against us?”
“Everyone receives him,” Annette insists, “even Madame Camuse. If he sours on us, what then?”
“Do you have something against him, Claire?” asks Felicia. “Of course what happened to Dora is most appalling. But she has always been heedless…”
“He’s not a bad guy, you know,” says Annette. “He has his orders. He can’t ignore them. In any case, he’s a handsome soldier. He’s a wonderful dancer and always brings gifts for the ladies. Just the other day, he brought back a magnificent necklace to Corrine Laplanche from Port-au-Prince.”
“Well, it’s normal for someone like Corrine Laplanche to accept his presents, but not you,” Felicia retorted.
“Why?”
“Because your name is Annette Clamont.”
“That’s rubbish,” Annette cried. “Corrine Laplanche is better educated than all the Clamont sisters put together. The only difference is that her parents don’t belong to good society, as you so often like to say, that’s all. And anyway, her mother, Elina Jean-Francois, was a classmate of Claire’s… Isn’t that right, Claire?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“I won’t bother asking why you didn’t befriend her,” she added. “Well, me, I choose the people I like wherever I happen to meet them, without giving any thought to their table manners. The only thing I ask of them is that they have qualities that I don’t have and can’t help but admire.”
My sentiments precisely. Did I put those words in her mouth?
“That’s very good, Annette,” Jean Luze offers approvingly, looking at her with interest. “You are not as harebrained as you like to seem. You should read more, for your own good…”
“I am only twenty-two! I have plenty of time. I don’t mind fumbling around before finding myself.”
“Believe me, you can fumble around just as well while educating yourself,” Jean Luze answered. “But it’s Claire’s birthday and not yours. Let her choose her guests herself.”
“So there won’t be anyone,” Annette concluded with despair.
“There will be us,” I replied calmly.
“And Monsieur Long,” said Annette.
“And Monsieur Long.”
Jean Luze caught up with me by the bedroom door.
“You hate him, don’t you?”
“Who?”
“The commandant.”
“I don’t like people I don’t know.”
“What about me, you must like me since you know me, right? Do you like me, Claire?”
“Of course I do. Aren’t you my brother-in-law?”
“That’s not a good enough reason.”
He laughed, leaning a hand on the wall.
“A piece of advice: don’t make a show of your antipathy for Caledu,” he said to me. “You could pay dearly for it. I am new here but I have already understood a few things. In the middle of the twentieth century your little town is going through what France went through during the time of Louis XVI. It would be amusing if it were not tragic. Play along and keep your head down with the commandant and his people. Don’t make a show of your antipathy as Dora Soubiran did. That kind of attitude is pointless and can’t end well…”
I left him abruptly and went in my room. Who does he take me for? I, who tremble with fright at the slightest noise, I, who avoid suspects to the point that I won’t see Dora, I, who won’t exchange words or looks with these armed men, and here he thinks me capable of braving that hangman Caledu. The fool! I am a coward and I know it. My cozy bourgeois upbringing is like a tattoo on my skin. Is he that blind? How dare he confuse a lover’s loathing, a lover’s outrage, for something else, that’s what I can’t forgive!
I saw Dora passing by. She hobbles along with legs spread apart like a maimed animal. What have they done to her? What awful torments has she endured that for a month now she has been unable to walk normally? Dr. Audier looks after her but he keeps his mouth shut. I saw him leave her house recently, head down, a frown on his brow.
“And our neighbor?” Jean Luze asked him.
He stared at him without answering, lips contorted.
He is brave enough for looking after a victim, Dr. Audier must tell himself. The reign of terror has broken his spirit. The politician, the great champion of freedom and the rights of man that he was when my father was alive, is dead in him. He even smiles when he shakes Caledu’s hand. He is old and experienced. He smiles at the prefect. He smiles at the mayor. Despite his hatred for our former occupiers, he smiles at M. Long. M. Long, who buys anything that grows at low prices and who lives around here, has cleverly found shelter under the wings of the authorities in order to better suck our blood. And these black imbeciles seem flattered by the white man’s self-serving friendship. His house is protected with a wire fence, his water filtered, his food disinfected. He’s not taking any chances with microbes and mosquitoes. Malaria and typhoid will not get the better of him. Since the authorities only have one thing on their minds-to get rich by any means necessary, to humiliate those who once humiliated them and crush the arrogant bourgeois-M. Long exploits this desire, nodding and applauding:
Today is Sunday. I put on my long-sleeved dress and my black hat and went to mass. I followed the ceremony without participating, eyes on my prayer book and rosary in hand. My mind was elsewhere.
