“Monsieur Long gave me two bottles of whiskey,” Jean Luze announces. “I’ll invite him to the party.”
“Fine,” nods Félicia.
“What about the commandant?” Annette asks.
“No,” I protest forcefully.
“Oh! You know,” she says coldly, “we are no longer living in the days of our dear parents. Prejudice is out of fashion.”
“This has nothing to do with prejudice,” I reply.
“We should still have him over once in a while,” prudent Félicia adds cautiously. “What good would it do to turn him against us?”
“Everyone receives him,” Annette insists, “even Madame Camuse. If he sours on us, what then?”
“Do you have something against him, Claire?” asks Félicia. “Of course what happened to Dora is most appalling. But she has always been heedless…”
“He’s not a bad guy, you know,” says Annette. “He has his orders. He can’t ignore them. In any case, he’s a handsome soldier. He’s a wonderful dancer and always brings gifts for the ladies. Just the other day, he brought back a magnificent necklace to Corrine Laplanche from Port-au-Prince.”
“Well, it’s normal for someone like Corrine Laplanche to accept his presents, but not you,” Félicia retorted.
“Why?”
“Because your name is Annette Clamont.”
“That’s rubbish,” Annette cried. “Corrine Laplanche is better educated than all the Clamont sisters put together. The only difference is that her parents don’t belong to good society, as you so often like to say, that’s all. And anyway, her mother, Élina Jean-François, was a classmate of Claire’s… Isn’t that right, Claire?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“I won’t bother asking why you didn’t befriend her,” she added. “Well, me, I choose the people I like wherever I happen to meet them, without giving any thought to their table manners. The only thing I ask of them is that they have qualities that I don’t have and can’t help but admire.”
My sentiments precisely. Did I put those words in her mouth?
“That’s very good, Annette,” Jean Luze offers approvingly, looking at her with interest. “You are not as harebrained as you like to seem. You should read more, for your own good…”
“I am only twenty-two! I have plenty of time. I don’t mind fumbling around before finding myself.”
“Believe me, you can fumble around just as well while educating yourself,” Jean Luze answered. “But it’s Claire’s birthday and not yours. Let her choose her guests herself.”
“So there won’t be anyone,” Annette concluded with despair.
“There will be us,” I replied calmly.
“And Monsieur Long,” said Annette.
“And Monsieur Long.”
Jean Luze caught up with me by the bedroom door.
“You hate him, don’t you?”
“Who?”
“The commandant.”
“I don’t like people I don’t know.”
“What about me, you must like me since you know me, right? Do you like me, Claire?”
“Of course I do. Aren’t you my brother-in-law?”
“That’s not a good enough reason.”
He laughed, leaning a hand on the wall.
“A piece of advice: don’t make a show of your antipathy for Calédu,” he said to me. “You could pay dearly for it. I am new here but I have already understood a few things. In the middle of the twentieth century your little town is going through what France went through during the time of Louis XVI. It would be amusing if it were not tragic. Play along and keep your head down with the commandant and his people. Don’t make a show of your antipathy as Dora Soubiran did. That kind of attitude is pointless and can’t end well…”
I left him abruptly and went in my room. Who does he take me for? I, who tremble with fright at the slightest noise, I, who avoid suspects to the point that I won’t see Dora, I, who won’t exchange words or looks with these armed men, and here he thinks me capable of braving that hangman Calédu. The fool! I am a coward and I know it. My cozy bourgeois upbringing is like a tattoo on my skin. Is he that blind? How dare he confuse a lover’s loathing, a lover’s outrage, for something else, that’s what I can’t forgive!
I saw Dora passing by. She hobbles along with legs spread apart like a maimed animal. What have they done to her? What awful torments has she endured that for a month now she has been unable to walk normally? Dr. Audier looks after her but he keeps his mouth shut. I saw him leave her house recently, head down, a frown on his brow.
“And our neighbor?” Jean Luze asked him.
He stared at him without answering, lips contorted.
He is brave enough for looking after a victim, Dr. Audier must tell himself. The reign of terror has broken his spirit. The politician, the great champion of freedom and the rights of man that he was when my father was alive, is dead in him. He even smiles when he shakes Calédu’s hand. He is old and experienced. He smiles at the prefect. He smiles at the mayor. Despite his hatred for our former occupiers, he smiles at M. Long. M. Long, who buys anything that grows at low prices and who lives around here, has cleverly found shelter under the wings of the authorities in order to better suck our blood. And these black imbeciles seem flattered by the white man’s self-serving friendship. His house is protected with a wire fence, his water filtered, his food disinfected. He’s not taking any chances with microbes and mosquitoes. Malaria and typhoid will not get the better of him. Since the authorities only have one thing on their minds-to get rich by any means necessary, to humiliate those who once humiliated them and crush the arrogant bourgeois-M. Long exploits this desire, nodding and applauding: Marvelous! Go ahead! God save Haiti!
Today is Sunday. I put on my long-sleeved dress and my black hat and went to mass. I followed the ceremony without participating, eyes on my prayer book and rosary in hand. My mind was elsewhere. Where are they? What are they doing? I was saying to myself. Jean Luze and Annette were still in bed when I left. I imagined them eating together. I could hear Annette’s laughter. I imagined Jean Luze’s eyes on her. On my knees, as the priest raised the wafer, I tried in vain to chase such thoughts away. It did not escape me that for some time now I’d been faking piety. I had lost my faith when I saw the children’s bodies piled high before my eyes after the last hurricane. Many of the oldest and meanest had been spared. Why? was the first unanswered question that gave me the courage to make my point. How many of these women kneeling to receive the body and blood of our Lord had never helped their fellow man? I asked myself that Sunday. All those around me were great sinners-usurers, exploiters, sadists, corrupters of virtue. I had known them from tender childhood. Not a soul you could praise to the skies. Not one who spared either Jane Bavière, or Agnès Grandupré, who died of consumption thanks to them, not one among them who failed to condemn the only just man among us, an old man named Tonton Mathurin, before whom my father learned to tremble.
They look so angelic in church! What were they thinking as they grimaced through their prayers? Were they trying to cheat God Himself, our overly tolerant God who calls all lost sheep to His bosom?
It was probably about seven in the evening.
I was on the landing and about to go downstairs when I looked up and caught Annette and Jean Luze exchanging glances. Annette took his hand first and pushed him into her bedroom. I pretended to go downstairs only to double back and put my ear to the door and my eye to the keyhole: they were still dressed and Jean Luze, his hands on her shoulders, stone-faced, unrecognizable, appeared to be fighting temptation. He threw her on the bed. Her skirt was tucked up, and he looked at her with a kind of hateful and appreciative curiosity. She moaned and brutally pulled him against her, eyes closed, nails biting into his back.