Up there, the mountains greened, resplendent despite the ruins, in spite of death. All of nature seemed to rise up purified from the squalls. At Lion Mountain, the coffee plants lay destroyed and uprooted atop a foot of soil that had been churned up by spindrift. In town, waterlogged goods piled up unrecognizable in the stinking muddy shopwindows. Haitian and Syrian storekeepers alike were crying and wailing. Of course, those hit hardest were the peasants. Homeless and destitute, they came down the mountain to swell the ranks of the beggars. The harsh sun returned after the hurricane and dried out the enormous mounds of garbage choking the streets. Mud turned to dust, a thick, blinding dust that became a whirlwind at the slightest breeze. Typhoid, malaria, and influenza kept everyone in their sickbed. Poor children died every day by the dozen for lack of care. Father Paul continued to draw on our devotion and the Daughters of Mary worked like galley slaves. Eugénie Duclan, Jane Bavière, Dora Soubiran and I helped Mme Camuse, whom Father Paul made president of the Relief Association. Mme Marti, our dressmaker, had died under rather mysterious circumstances. She was found at her home, her neck half-slit. “She tried to save our little dog! She ran in to get our little dog!” her children sobbed. Mme Camuse took them in. Fifty coffins were blessed in a ceremony attended even by the least pious among us. Father Paul’s sermons spared no one. Our bloodstained land had been washed clean by God’s mighty waters, he repeated, and the wind, he hoped, had by the same measure cast out the Evil Spirit. One strange detail troubled me, however: M. Petrold’s house had suffered no damage, and at that moment I began reconsidering God’s ways. Despite the failure of the harvest, M. Petrold bid on our piece of land and bought my factory, my piano and the sixty remaining acres of Lion Mountain. Discouraged, many of the landowners followed my example and sold their fields and went to work for him. I had put my money in the bank, following Dr. Audier’s advice. I calculated that by living frugally, we could hold out for a few years. Life stretched before me flat and hard, without joy or surprise, and I lost hope of ever getting married.
When the streets were nearly cleared by the prisoners and other volunteers, we received a delegation of doctors and an American commission who arrived by boat from Port-au-Prince. The State Department, without any bitterness, played its philanthropic role, for the Americans had left our country four years ago. I saw Frantz Camuse at his mother’s. He seemed astonished by my self-assurance. His eyes had acquired a kind of acuity, no doubt due to his profession, and he looked at me for a long time.
“What’s happening to our province?” he asked me. “There is much talk of it in Port-au-Prince as a perpetual source of turmoil.”
“I don’t understand…”
“The killings, the clan feuds have been brought to the attention of the police. Your district commandant is about to be replaced by another, who, from what I hear, will know how to keep you in line. What happened on your land, Claire?”
“I no longer have any land,” I answered dryly. “Lion Mountain no longer belongs to the Clamonts.”
He walked me home, indifferent but friendly. For eight days, he bandaged the wounded and gave as much help as he could. Once I caught him shaking his head before a child whose legs had been shattered by a fallen tree.
“We are cursed, according to Father Paul,” I whispered.
He frowned and looked at me without answering and then leaned over his patient. When he finished with the bandage, he looked up and said:
“You are quite changed, Claire.”
“For better or worse?”
“I don’t know. But something in you rings false.”
“So then, for the worse,” I said triumphantly. And I pressed my lips together tight.
Imbecile! I felt like yelling at him. I’m not the little prude you once knew, take me in your arms.
He left two days later without trying to see me again.
That very evening, I received the lieutenant, who came with Jane. She was pretty, lively, spontaneous. The lieutenant loved her and wanted to marry her. From where I sat, I could see movement behind Mme Bavière’s blinds; like all mothers in this town, she tyrannized and spied on her daughter. I gently closed my door to prevent her from seeing what was going on in my house. How did I become so open-minded if not from the desire to avenge my strict upbringing? Rebelling against everything that had been branded upon me, I insisted on destroying all myths without seeming to do so and was shaking off my yoke in secret. Through the open door, Annette mischievously spied on the enlaced lovers. Soon enough I saw her hanging off Jacques Marti’s neck, kissing him on the lips. I smiled. She dared do what I, sixteen years her senior, never could. Frantz Camuse was lost to me forever; I knew that all hope of getting married was to be buried. What man here could ever replace him?
But then one day Justin Rollier returned from Port-au-Prince. Twelve years had passed since my father’s death. We saw each other again with pleasure, and in the evenings once again a man’s voice could be heard in the house. Annette caressed and kissed him and kept repeating that he was the handsomest man in this province. Had all three of us been in love with him? Félicia smiled calmly over her embroidery while Augustine and I set the table as quietly as possible and served our guest. Once, I caught Félicia staring at him and realized then that she too could become a dangerous rival one day. Justin was cheerful. He sang beautiful love songs for us and recited poetry.
“My three Graces!” he cried out one evening before the charming group we made under the lamplight.
“Which do you prefer?” Annette asked. “Which of us do you find most beautiful?”
“My heart cannot choose between the three of you,” he answered laughing, but his eyes met mine in a very loving way.
Annette was just a child. Justin was thirty years old. In private, he gave me one of his poems and asked me to wait three years for him. The deadline he had given himself to find a position and save up a little money so he could start a family.
“I am leaving, Claire, I have to. But if you promise to wait for me, I will come back and I will marry you. Three years go by quickly. At least that’s what we’ll tell ourselves to be more patient…”
I didn’t even have the guts to give him my hand.
When he returned, Annette was fifteen. She jumped on his neck but in a different way. He defended himself, sought me with his eyes, but he stared at Annette with admiration. He was visiting just as often as before, but he wasn’t coming for me, as I quickly realized. Annette had eclipsed me without even trying, and in comparison I could feel the decline of my youth. One night I caught them kissing and I ran to my room and locked myself in.
“I love Justin,” Annette told me the next day, “and he loves me. Oh! Claire, I’m so happy!”
We learned of her engagement at the same time we learned of Jane’s. Three months later, Justin died of pneumonia and Jane’s lieutenant in a car accident on his way to Port-au-Prince where he had been recalled.
Annette cried, then forgot. Jane, however, was pregnant. I was the first to whom she confessed this. Tattooed as I was by my bourgeois upbringing, I feared the responsibility and abandoned her in her distress. Her parents shut her away. She fled. I let her run without helping her. During the five years she lived in the lowly quarter where girls from good families were forbidden to go, I avoided talking to her or even greeting her. I think this is the only mistake for which I reproach myself. A few days after the death of the lieutenant, a new district commandant arrived by the name of Calédu.
With this name I will return to the present. Dawn rises on my sleepless night. I have tried to revive without too much distortion those I have known and those cut down by death. I don’t know to what extent I have succeeded. This resurrected past appeared to me as through a thick veil behind which I have evolved separate from my real self: an astonished spectator of my own life.