Last night he entertained Joël’s friends. Sad poets, overcome with alcoholism, who stumble along the walls when the sun goes down. He has found people to protect, guide, advise. He feels he’s doing something useful with his life. Maybe thanks to them he will decide not to leave!
“Jean has finally made some friends,” Félicia says. “I hear Joël is incredibly intelligent, and that he likes music and books as well.”
How lonely he must have been! I am ashamed of us. Oh! What I wouldn’t give to get rid of my complexes. They stop me from opening my mouth and expressing my ideas even when I’m choking on them. We put all of our intellect in the service of profit and flattery Whatever Dr. Audier says, terror has turned us into resigned cowards. Who will help us? Who is fearless and has the courage to cry out the truth if not Jean Luze? I listen without taking part in any of these conversations. The screams wafting from the prison make both of us wince. “Filthy torturer! Filthy torturer!” he muttered the other night, angrily running his hand through his hair. He’ll end up making himself a suspect. I can see the moment when Calédu will accuse him of meeting with “suspicious intellectuals.” My silent hatred has even contaminated Félicia. “I can’t take it anymore,” she once burst out, covering her ears… She was so afraid of her own voice that she suddenly fell silent with her eyes closed and her mouth agape. And I could see her lashes trembling with tears.
Eugénie Duclan is getting married. She is happy as a lark, going door-to-door to announce the joyful event. Annette bursts out laughing when she shares the news with Félicia.
“Paul is sure that poor Charles has been ‘past it’ for ages, if you know what I mean. Eugénie will be so disappointed! But who would think to get married at that age!”
She takes me as her witness.
It seems that past a certain age, marrying for the sake of convenience is as ridiculous as marrying for love. Custom is as powerful as fashion-impossible to disregard either without giving offense.
Eugénie Duclan
is so bold
at forty years old
to let it all hang…
sings Annette. She did not invent the song, everyone knows it, as she is amused to tell Félicia.
Eugénie wants a first-class wedding and dares invite me to be part of her procession along with the other Daughters of Mary. She has done her hair and made herself up like a young girl. It looks like she’s wearing a wrinkled, sexless, tragic mask.
“I know people are making fun of me,” she tells me, “but that’s too bad. Would you agree to be my maid of honor? We have to stick together…”
Who should stick together, and why?
I nearly throw her out after promising to do everything she wants. The only thing I’m afraid of is Jean Luze catching me in such grotesque company. I don’t care to belong to any sisterhood. The idea that I’m an old maid, set apart and original, pleases me…
Jean Luze is talking with Joël in the living room as Annette flits around them. Félicia is nursing Jean-Claude. Jean Luze is so absorbed in conversation that he doesn’t even notice Annette’s presence. He is leaning over Joël and speaking to him in a low voice. It’s Joël who seems distracted. His eyes follow Annette, and Jean Luze turns around angrily.
“Why are you buzzing around us?” he asks her.
“Me, buzzing around you?” she asks, taken aback. “But I’m doing no such thing.”
She runs downstairs and joins Félicia in the dining room.
“Apparently, I am a nuisance to our gentlemen and their philosophical discussions. I wonder what your husband thinks is so special about that little birdbrain.”
“He’s very cultivated for his age, Jean told me.”
“Bah! he’s a man all the same, isn’t he?”
“What do you expect? Intellectuals are interested in things besides women.”
“That’s a shame!”
Félicia yawns.
“But you yourself have nothing to complain about. Are you happy?” she asks Annette.
“Yes.”
“Paul is a good husband?”
“He’s a good lover.”
“What does that mean?”
Annette smiles wickedly and fixes a lock of hair on her lovely forehead.
“It means what it means. You’re no choir girl. It’s just that some husbands don’t do right by their wives. Making love is little more than an obligation for them. Wham bam, and that’s it! Such husbands are bad lovers; but others treat their wives like mistresses: they are good husbands and good lovers at the same time.”
“What theories!”
“Well, it’s not so bad in practice either, believe me.”
She said this protectively, sure of herself. Is she trying to diminish Jean Luze in Félicia’s eyes with these insinuating comparisons? Or was she offering her opinion of him in light of her more recent experience?
“I’m only telling you what Paul taught me,” she continues cruelly. “If a man is holding a woman in his arms and restrains himself, he’s either impotent or abnormal.”
I notice a worried look in Félicia’s eyes.
“Well, I assume that’s never happened to you,” she says weakly.
“It did, once.”
Félicia’s fingers curl around the arm of her chair.
“Ah! Well, what does any of this matter as long as people love each other,” she adds, annoyed.
“I used to think the same way before Paul.”
“So your Paul is a god?”
“No. He’s a black man and he knows how to take a woman. He is so passionate that all he would have to do is brush against your hand to desire you.”
“Don’t tell your friends about that.”
“I’ll kill anyone who comes near him.”
“You’re crazy,” Félicia replied simply.
But she was gasping.
The rain requires fresh processions, this time to make it stop. It’s raining interminably and, as luck would have it, right after the extensive clear-cutting of trees. For fifteen days, we have heard the whine of M. Long’s electric saw without interruption. A tree falls every five minutes. I crept around the coast yesterday to witness this bloodbath. Immense trees fell to the ground with what sounded like a great roar before their dying breath. The whole region had already been cleared and the peasants, harassed by Calédu, wore inscrutable, hostile, troubled faces. Avalanches of soil slid down the mountains and piled around their feet. Coffee is nothing but a memory for all of us. Timber export has replaced that business. When the wood is gone, he will go after something else. The slave trade, perhaps. He could easily ship hundreds from among the beggars. There’s been recent talk about hiring out peasants to cut sugarcane in the Dominican Republic. This was mentioned in the Port-au-Prince newspapers that Dr. Audier regularly receives. A commission composed of doctors, typists and accountants is expected to arrive next week. The human trade known as Operation Fight the Famine has begun. Is M. Long also getting in on the scheme? Word has spread and the peasants are abandoning their bleached, bled-dry land to watch the cars arriving from Port-au-Prince. Their number swells day by day.
I hear that they’ve been reduced to eating dogs at Lion Mountain. “Why not? We do eat beef and goat, after all,” Annette says. I can see it coming, we’ll soon turn into cannibals. Many of us find this entertaining. “Ugh! Eating dog! It must taste awful! And what criminal instincts these children have!” Mme Audier opines. Eugénie Duclan simply accuses them of being gluttonous and abnormal. “There’s no other way to understand it. Other people’s problems are their own business, of course, that’s as sure as death.”
“In the street I see people so filthy that I want to throw up,” Annette complains. “It’s disgusting. They could at least wash.”
She is pregnant and her husband has taken the habit of imposing her upon us more and more. Is it so she won’t get suspicious? He always claims to be detained by business meetings. Annette goes after Félicia without mercy. She can hardly think what else to come up with next to hurt her and destroy her peace. Does she envy her, contrary to what she says? Tension is rising between them. Félicia can be pretty resourceful when it comes to defending her man.