For the moment, she feels obliged to moan like a polecat over the layette of the expected newborn.
Jean Luze chats with Dr. Audier. They dredge up memories of Paris. How and when the conversation turns, I can’t say. I only hear Dr. Audier answer:
“Yes, I am taking care of Dora Soubiran just as I have taken care of all the women beaten by Calédu. I suspect we’re dealing with a sadist who is avenging himself for his impotence with women. At least that’s my suspicion, because he’s also a bitter man who may simply be punishing others for their social status. His choice of victims reveals that much.”
“Why not complain?” Jean Luze asks.
“To whom?” Audier replies. “To the people who sent him to purge this town?”
“But how is it possible that there’s nothing you can do!”
“So you still don’t get it,” Dr. Audier said with despair. “People are right to say that no matter how educated they may be, foreigners can barely understand us even if they watch how we live for a hundred years.”
“I think I’ve understood quite a few things,” Jean Luze replies smiling, “but what astonishes and disgusts me a little, I confess, is the well-behaved fatalism with which you pull down your breeches for the lash. I see around me neither revolt nor even the semblance of revolt, nothing that would show your discontent.”
“You are wrong. This region is caught in the line of terror. But maybe this is just for the time being. We Haitians have earned our independence in a way few nations can boast. We are still a very young nation. Maybe we find it normal to take the lash, as you say, from time to time. The response will come. In good time, it will come, believe me…”
“I won’t be around for that, unfortunately.”
“You”-Dr. Audier shook his finger at him-“the Export Corporation isn’t keeping you on.”
“My contract expires in three months. I’ve saved up quite a bit…”
He mops the sweat from his brow and smiles.
“I am going to lose it, I know it.”
Félicia looks at him without a word.
She will accept whatever he wishes. She, too, would follow him to the ends of the earth.
Félicia is decidedly better. I miss her illness, which provided so many excuses to intrude on their privacy. I would see Jean Luze in his pajamas, lying under the sheets, dreaming or sleepy. Once, on purpose, I opened the door of their bedroom without knocking. He was in boxer shorts.
“Hey, watch it, Claire,” he cried out with glee, “or your eyes will melt.”
And laughing, he threw on some pants.
That very day, in fact, Félicia talked to me about Annette.
“There are things that went on here,” she told me, “that my husband and I wish to keep to ourselves, Claire darling, and besides, it is useless to trouble you with such secrets… Annette worries me. The life she leads scandalizes even Jean. Because you have been a mother to her, I think it falls to you to question and advise her. Did you know she comes home every night after two?”
“She goes out with her friends, at least that’s what she tells me.”
“She gets drunk. She’s too young to lead such a life. Madame Audier, with all the tact she could muster, has told me that her reputation is compromised. If there were to be a scandal, God forbid, it would also reflect on us. Our parents left us an unblemished name, and Annette is sullying it.”
I took all of this in without adding anything. She must have thought this was more than I could handle.
So it was for fear of scandal that she has agreed to reconcile with Annette! It was for fear of scandal that she turned the page so quickly and that she tolerated the rival in her midst? It is true that we have equal title to this house and it would fall to her to leave this house, since Jean Luze has a good job. But she’s practical and she must have thought of everything: her health is fragile and she’s a bad housekeeper. Leaving the house would mean losing her housekeeper, the godmother-to-be she had planned on wringing like a sponge, the all-purpose old maid who will wipe her son’s ass while she pets her man. She’s thought things through. She is so afraid to aggravate things between her and Annette that she wants to use me as a screen. I will not be anyone’s screen. Annette is free. Let her float her own boat where she pleases. I won’t say a word to her. I’d rather lecture that hypocrite Mme Audier. No one can ever please her. She has a forked tongue that’s grown more venomous with age, though Father Paul lays the body of Christ on it once a month. A true pillar of the church, always devoted to the Holy Virgin or to Saint Jude, always airing everybody’s dirty laundry or simply inventing things to make conversation. She has always been a public menace, a seemingly harmless monster in great demand in idle circles. I have heard stories about her that are not so funny and behind closed doors my mother accused her of writing anonymous letters to cuckolded husbands to open their eyes. With Félicia, she plays the respectable woman condemning this one or the other. But a woman like her, overflowing with vitality and imagination even at sixty-five, it’s hard to see her settling only for her Jules. Or if she did settle it was only for fear of scandal.
From my room, I can hear the Creole mutterings of our Augustine, who has served the Clamonts for thirty years-the past ten of them for me, Claire the abolitionist, who claims to be restoring justice to the kingdom of this world, at least in my own modest way. I pay her, whereas she worked for my parents for free. What more can she possibly want? Perhaps she finds solace in talking to herself, but I don’t want her spittle on my dishes. We are both crabby. Does she also live without a man? What’s bothering this poor ignorant black woman from the hills? We live with daggers drawn. She is careless and I am obsessive. A character flaw in old maids-although I know that a few of us do live like pigs. I am enraged by a speck of dust. I sniff the tableware and the dishes with suspicion, something that exasperates her; I ignore her petty thefts. I am not naïve: a servant is faithful when it is in her interest.
“You’re poisoning everything,” Félicia protests when I chase mosquitoes from the nooks and corners of the house with DDT.
Like all idle women, she is a member of the live-and-let-live school of housekeeping, and thinks that everything is in order just because she’s embroidering clothes for her future child.
The truth is that tracking down dust distracts me. And what’s more, I take pride in being an impeccable housekeeper. When Jean Luze’s ash falls on the carpet, I go down on my knees to pick it up. Since his wife’s pregnancy I am the one who mends all of his clothes, and he turns to me for this more and more.
“Claire, can you sew this button, please?”
And there I am, caressing the fly of his pants where I am sewing the button. He thanks me by letting his gaze linger on me. His eyes are like precious stones in a velvet box. I will adore the wee one if he ends up looking like him, and that will be my cross, to fight a feeling I would rather suppress out of pride.
“Drink less and try to lead a decent life,” Félicia said severely to Annette this morning.
“What do you mean by a decent life?” she replied with impertinence.
“Félicia is giving you advice for your own good,” I added for good measure.
“Ah!”
Her butterfly-wing eyes flashed and she took the bottle of rum to pour herself another glass.