I hear his steps creaking on the stairs and it’s now my turn to lean over Felicia.
“My God, what’s happened to her?” Annette exclaims, hands on her heart.
She can’t play innocent. Acting is not her strong suit. She didn’t want these complications. She’s nervous, and she’s nervous that she’s nervous.
I avoid answering. I am busy rubbing Felicia’s hands.
“Leave the room, Annette.” That’s all I say.
Felicia and I are alone. I rub some alcohol on her cheeks, slap her and call her name. She comes to and starts sobbing.
“Claire! Claire!”
Oh no, I don’t want to hear anything. I’ll take care of her as always, but I don’t want to hear her secrets. Spare this poor old maid!
“Claire! Claire!”
“Keep quiet. You will just make things worse and you will lose the child.”
Jean Luze returns with Dr. Audier. She hides her face in her hands and bursts into fresh sobs. After examining her, Audier gives her a shot and prescribes a few days’ bed rest.
“You better not leave her side,” he advises Jean Luze in a low voice. “She’s had a terrible shock.”
He is full of repentance. He kisses her and whispers something in her ear.
I am still there, watching every move.
“Nothing happened, I swear, nothing,” he repeats, now in a louder voice.
Does she believe him? She touches his face slowly, full of tenderness, as if she has already forgotten everything. What confidence she has in him!
“There’s no hemorrhaging, that’s good!” the doctor declares. “Just simple fainting!”
I see him out and then return to Felicia’s side. The injection has put her to sleep.
I turn to Jean Luze with the most sincere expression I can muster and ask:
“How did this happen?”
He looks at me casually.
“I have no idea. I was in the living room and I heard her scream…”
Oh, what good liars we are, both of us!
He did not go to work this morning. The door to their room is closed and Augustine has brought them breakfast in bed. Annette seems more nervous than last night. She paces up and down, eyes on their door. Why has he shut himself up with Felicia? What is he going to promise? The door opens in the afternoon and Jean Luze emerges, somber and so distant that it would take superhuman courage to approach him. Annette nevertheless calls out to him, and he looks at her with intentionally unconcealed antipathy. I hide in order to hear their conversation.
“It’s over, Annette,” he says, “I hope you’ve understood this. Felicia’s life and the baby’s life depend on your behavior. You have to control yourself.”
“But I can’t, I just can’t…”
“Let’s not overdo it, shall we.”
His tone is cutting.
“I love you.”
“Quiet.”
“Living like this with you but not with you, and to keep quiet? That’s too much.”
“In that case, Felicia and I will leave. I got married to have a home, children, to be done with being a man- about-town. I don’t want problems, understand? I don’t want trouble.”
His voice is so hard that I doubt ever having seen them in each other’s arms.
“So, you didn’t love me?”
Silence.
“So, you didn’t love me?”
He answers with total astonishment and profound contempt.
“Love you? Come on.”
There is another silence, during which I regret not being able to see the expression on Annette’s face. Mine is stubborn and unhappy. Is it because I think I could plead our case much better?
“No need to leave the house.” Her voice trembles.
“All right then?” Jean Luze asks.
“All right,” she answers.
They each return to their own quarters. I run to lock myself in my room. His words were a slap in her face, and I feel their heat on my cheeks. All right, she said. It’s not all right. I plan to fight this. I will not accept seeing this affair end so pathetically. If Annette resigns herself and turns the page like a good sport, well, I refuse. Her courage, the courage I never had, must be rewarded and she must live out this love to my full satisfaction, until she’s sated…
Feel free to shriek at the top of your lungs if you ever see this manuscript; call me indecent, immoral. Sprinkle me with stinging epithets if it makes you happy, but you will not intimidate me anymore. I have wasted my time taking you seriously and ruined my life. I want revenge. I am swimming against the tide. I’m letting go, filling myself with rage. My life is not enough anymore. Eating, running the house, getting drunk on sleep, that’s not a life. I want something else. Just like you, just like everyone else. Our serene little faces, that’s just for the sake of appearances; our satisfied little smiles are for others to envy. It comforts, makes life easier when others think we are the blessed of this earth. No need for me to pry into your private life. I know what’s there. All private lives are alike. Why would you be different from me? Suffocating fear makes freaks of all of us. That’s why we take shelter behind a facade. When the facade crumbles, we are handed over to merciless judges worse than we are. Their status protects them. I fear them. They have taught me hypocrisy. In my awful loneliness, I have discovered that society isn’t worth shit. Society hides behind a barricade of idiocy. Society is a killer of liberty. Unless we shake off our yoke, we will come into this world, suffer, grow old, and die, always resigned to our fate. Life is not generous to many. What has she given me? Nothing. I failed to assert myself, and she forgot all about me. Every old maid, it seems, must have a cat or dog beside her. Eugenie Duclan has her cat and Dora Soubiran her dog. I don’t like animals. Their touch repels me. The faithful dog licking your feet and the sweetest cat watching you so it can leap on the table disgust me. They remind me of my inferiors. For fear of scandal, I have repressed an ocean of love within me. I have wasted my charms on self-absorbed solitude. My mating season has expired. I am a desert without refuge. It’s too late for me to start living. And yet everything lives around me as if to sharpen my regret, even the insects. I have more respect for them than for those who confine themselves to chastity and who flatter themselves that they have preserved their dignity. As if dignity were lodged somewhere in the body! The couples on my pornographic postcards offer me instruction on lovemaking: they attend to basic needs. The repressed have this in common: they exaggerate the importance of what they deny themselves. The priests conceal their desire under a skirt, the nuns under a veil, and yet they are both obsessed by it. “Our first duty is to avoid scandal,” my father, who lived a scandalous life, would say. He made a martyr of me, all for the sake of teaching me wisdom. Wisdom! I believed in this for a long time before discovering how empty it was. It’s debilitating. Happiness is fleeting. You need a touch of madness to catch it in its flight.
Annette did not come down for meals today. Neither did the Luzes. Since Felicia’s “indisposition,” Jean Luze comes home from work to lock himself up with her and I am alone in the dining room, putting together meals that I have Augustine send up. The house is quieter than a cemetery. As soon as Annette slips out, Jean Luze makes for the living room to listen to his music. I know his concerto by heart from hearing it so much. I love it as much as he does. It transports me so far away that when I return to myself, my nerves feel so naked that I find my daily life unbearable. Felicia, on the contrary, likes nothing that he likes. Music leaves her cold, books too. I secretly raid Jean Luze’s library. I have discovered real treasures on my own. Not even his science books put me off.
There is a crowd again on the main road. M. Long, with the prefect and the commandant at his side, tries to convince the peasants that the trees should be chopped down to sell the wood.
“Selling this wood will make you rich faster than coffee did,” M. Long says in the Creole of a
“If you buy it at the price of coffee, we’ll still be poor, Mister Long,” one peasant replies.
From the doors of their stores, the Syrians follow the scene, exchanging opinions in a language known only to them.
