“Well then, my little sheep, getting sheared are you?” one of his colleagues had recently asked.
Overexcited from all these thoughts, he stood up and went toward the guard.
“I would like to remind you, sir,” he said, “that this is my third appointment. I’ve been waiting for two hours. Can I expect to be admitted?”
The guard leaned toward him without looking at him, his eyes on Rose, who was yawning and wriggling in her chair. At about eleven, a peephole high up on the wall opened up and eyes appeared behind it, noticed by no one save Louis Normil. The guard tilted his head to listen to someone talking to him from the other side of the door and immediately said:
“Monsieur Louis Normil.”
Rose got up, gestured at her father, and, shrugging her shoulders, went through the door that the guard held wide open. For a brief instant she waited for her father, who hesitated as if he had suddenly thought to run away. He was awkwardly trying to free himself from the other clients standing close enough to smother him. A myopic woman came so close to him to see who he was that her glasses touched his chin.
“Let the gentleman pass,” the guard said.
Rose held out her hand to her father and the door immediately closed behind them.
A stocky man, his eyes hidden by enormous black glasses, poked up his head over a pile of papers. Next door, one could hear voices whispering and the clicking of typewriters. A screen behind the lawyer’s table imperfectly concealed a leather couch and a coffee table with cold leftovers on top of it.
“Come in,” the lawyer said.
And he pointed to two armchairs a good distance from him, in which Rose and her father sat down. Louis Normil held out his hand to the lawyer, who did not seem to have noticed. He had the unpleasant and aggressive look of a starving bulldog. He tilted back in his chair, lifting a leg and resting it over one of the supports.
“How may I help you, sir?” he said in a slow, slightly nasal voice.
Ill at ease, Louis Normil decided on an almost familiar, friendly tone, and reminded the lawyer they had been schoolmates.
“I guess one could say we’ve been childhood friends,” he concluded.
The lawyer seemed to search his memory in vain for a convincing truce of this, and his large flabby lips became creased in distaste.
“Right… right… school, you say. Well, maybe. But I can’t seem to recall, though really I wish I could, ever being invited to your house. Childhood friends, that’s saying quite a lot. Our lives have been so different.”
“Different!” Louis Normil exclaimed, flabbergasted by the turn the conversation was taking.
“You were raised in the well-to-do neighborhood of Turgeau, and I behind the cemetery, right? Is there no difference?” he suddenly yelled.
Then, softening his tone:
“For a time, rich blacks played the same role in this country as rich mulattoes did,” he continued. “Your father was as contemptuous and full of social prejudice as your Turgeau neighbors. I only have to look at you to know that what I am saying is true. And now, actually, I think I do remember: I was a good student and you failed pathetically at your baccalaureate exams: yet you ate to your heart’s content while I did not. I envied you and you knew nothing about it, but, well, maybe that’s the secret of my success. You too would have worked really hard if you were envious of someone.”
“I don’t see…” Louis Normil mumbled, disconcerted.
“But that’s not the point of your visit,” the lawyer cut in. “How can I help you?”
Until then he had paid no attention to Rose. She looked at her father who, having lost face, mumbled as he outlined his situation. The lawyer listened without batting an eye, and when he finished speaking, became quiet and said:
“Do you know what you are asking me to do?” he replied in a low voice so altered that Rose shivered. “This affair demands time and considerable expense and the least stumble could cost me my head. First, I’ll have to resort to approaching… certain highly placed”-he hesitated to say the word-“figures who will judge whether you do or do not deserve to have your property restored to you. Next, I’ll have to act with extreme caution so as not to upset those who have decided to seize your land.”
“But the land belongs to us!” Rose cried out. “My father was hoping to sell it so that my brother and I could go abroad.”
He slowly turned his head toward her, and she had the unpleasant impression that he was undressing her behind his glasses.
“You wanted to leave, you say? Aren’t you happy here, Mademoiselle?”
“Yes… of course… but we would have preferred to finish our studies elsewhere.”
“What do you have against our universities?”
“Well… nothing.”
Suddenly he turned away from her and began impatiently riffling through the pile of papers in front of him, then grabbed an ashtray and rapped twice on his desk.
A third invisible door to the right opened and a typist walked in carrying a notepad on which she had already started scribbling a few lines.
“Mademoiselle, please type this up,” the lawyer said to her. “On this day, February eighth, 19-, according to the petition of Monsieur Louis Normil, residing in this town, it has transpired that he has been unjustly dispossessed of his land…”
“Forgive me, but I don’t believe I used the word unjust,” Louis Normil added with a distressingly flattering smile.
“Strike that word, Mademoiselle,” the lawyer ordered, imperturbably calm, “it has transpired that Monsieur Louis Normil has been dispossessed of his land… and an investigation is under way to determine whether these invaders…”
“I never uttered that word either, counselor…”
“Strike that, Mademoiselle… whether parties established on said land hold legal documents in accordance with statute.”
The secretary flashed a crooked smile, then suppressed a chuckle.
At that moment there was a loud knock on the door and before the lawyer was able to answer it, a small skinny man wearing a black uniform came in, his bony and disproportionately long hands dangling at the end of his arms like the paws of a gorilla. The lawyer leaped out of his armchair and rushed toward the little man, bowing very low.
“How are you?” he asked, his fat lips open in an affable and welcoming smile.
With his two hands the little man lifted the weapons hanging on his belt and sat one buttock on the edge of the desk.
“Sit in the armchair,” the lawyer gushed, “you’ll be more comfortable there.”
“That’s all right, that’s all right,” the little man answered, then crossed his booted legs and turned his head toward Rose, staring at her quietly.
“It just so happens, my dear friend,” the lawyer continued in his slow nasal voice, but this time in a congenial tone. “It so happens I was just thinking about you…”
Putting a light hand on his shoulder, the lawyer discreetly motioned to follow him behind the screen. They whispered for a moment, and when they reappeared Rose found the short man shamelessly ogling her again.
“Yes,” he said in response to a question the lawyer had probably asked him during their tête-à-tête. “Yes, that might work. Tell him so and present the conditions quite plainly. She’s not bad. As you know, I’m hard to please and I’ve been disappointed before. I don’t want to come out on the short end of this.”
At that, he burst into loud hysterical laughter that shook his whole body. He left the room still laughing and as he passed by Rose he brazenly brushed her knee with his hairy hand.
“Let’s go, Papa,” she said, feeling as though there were suddenly less air in the room.
“Now, now,” the lawyer intoned with his nose, “I see the little miss is in a hurry to leave us.”