The Comedians

'And you? Don't tell me you won't have been comforted by all sorts of women in all sorts of ways.'

Our voices rose higher and higher in the darkness under the statue. Like all such quarrels it led to nothing except a wound which easily heals. There are places for so many different wounds before we find ourselves breaking an old scab. I got out of her car and walked across to mine. I sat down at the wheel and began to back the car. I told myself it was the end - the game wasn't worth the candle - let her stay with the beastly child - there were many more attractive women to be found at Mиre Catherine's - she was a German anyway. I called, 'Good-bye, Frau Pineda' viciously out of the window as I came parallel to her car, and then I saw her bent over the wheel crying. I suppose it was necessary to say good-bye to her once before I realized that I could not do without her.

When I got back beside her, she was already in control. 'It's no good,' she said, 'tonight.'

'No.'

'Shall we see each other tomorrow?'

'Of

course.'

'Here. As usual?'

'Yes.'

She said, 'There is something I meant to tell you. A surprise for you. Something you badly want.'

For a moment I thought she was going to surrender to me and promise to leave her husband and her child. I put my arm round her to support her in the great decision and she said, 'You need a good cook, don't you?'

'Oh - yes. Yes. I suppose I do.'

'We've got a wonderful cook and he's leaving us. I engineered a row on purpose and sacked him. He's yours if you want him.' I think she was hurt again by my silence. 'Now don't you believe I love you? My husband will be furious. He said that Andrй was the only cook in Port-au-Prince who could make a proper soufflй.' I stopped myself just in time from saying, 'And Angel? He likes his food too.'

'You've made my fortune,' I said instead. And what I said was nearly true

- the Trianon soufflй au Grand Marnier was famous for a time, until the terror started and the American Mission left, and the British Ambassador was expelled, and the Nuncio never returned from Rome, and the curfew put a barrier between us worse than any quarrel, until at last I too flew out on the last Delta plane to New Orleans. Joseph had only just escaped with his life from his interrogation by the Tontons Macoute and I was scared. They were after me, I felt certain. Perhaps Fat Gracia, the head of the Tontons, wanted my hotel. Even Petit Pierre no longer looked in for a free drink. For weeks I was alone with the injured Joseph, the cook, the maid and the gardener. The hotel had need of paint and repairs, but what good was there in spending the labour without the hope of guests? Only the John Barrymore suite I kept in good order like a grave.

There was little in our love-affair now to balance the fear and the boredom. The telephone had ceased to work: it stood there on my desk like a relic of better times. With the curfew it was no longer possible for us to meet at night, while in the day there was always Angel. I thought I was escaping from love as well as politics when at last I received my exit visa at the police station after ten hours' wait, with the heavy smell of urine in the air and policemen returning with a smile of satisfaction from the cells. I remember a priest who sat all day in a white soutane and his stony attitude of long and undisturbed patience as he read his breviary. His name was never called. Pinned behind his head on the liver-coloured wall were the snapshots of Barbot, the dead defector and his broken companions who had been machine-gunned in a hut on the edge of the capital a month before. When the police sergeant gave me my visa at last, shoving it across the counter like a crust of bread to a beggar, someone told the priest that the police station was closed for the night. I suppose he came back next day. It was as good a place as any other for him to read his breviary, for none of the transients dared to speak to him, now that the Archbishop was in exile and the President excommunicated.

What a wonderful place the city had been to leave, as I looked down at it through the free and lucid air, the plane pitching in the thunderstorm which loomed as usual over Kenscoff. The port seemed tiny compared with the vast wrinkled wasteland behind, the dry uninhabited mountains, like the broken backbone of an ancient beast excavated from the clay, stretching into the haze towards Cap Haпtien and the Dominican border. I would find some gambler, I told myself, to buy my hotel, and I would then be as unencumbered as on the day I drove up to Pйtionville and found my mother stretched in her great brothelly bed. I was happy to leave. I whispered it to the black mountain wheeling round below, I showed it in my smile to the trim American stewardess bringing me a highball of bourbon and to the pilot who came to report progress. It was four weeks before I woke to misery in my air-conditioned New York room in West 44th Street after dreaming of a tangle of limbs in a Peugeot car and a statue staring at the sea. I knew then that sooner or later I would return, when my obstinacy was exhausted, my business deal written off, and half a loaf eaten in fear would seem so much better than no bread.

CHAPTER IV

1

DOCTOR MAGIOT crouched a long time above the body of the ex-Minister. In the shadow cast by my torch he looked like a sorcerer exorcizing death. I hesitated to interrupt his rites, but I was afraid the Smiths might wake in their tower-suite, so at last I spoke to break his thoughts. 'They can't pretend it to be anything but suicide,' I said.

'They can pretend it to be whatever suits them,' he replied. 'Do not deceive yourself.' He began to empty the contents of the Minister's left pocket which was exposed by the position of the body. He said, 'He was one of the better ones,' and looked with care at each scrap of paper like a bank clerk checking notes for forgery, holding them close to his eyes and his big globular spectacles which he wore for reading only. 'We took our anatomy course together in Paris. But in those days even Papa Doc was a good enough man. I remember Duvalier in the typhoid outbreak in the twenties …'

'What are you looking for?'

'Anything which could identify him with you. In this island the Catholic prayer is very apt - "The devil is like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour".'

'He

hasn't

devoured

you.'

'Give him time.' He put a notebook in his pocket. 'We haven't the leisure to go through all this now.' Then he turned the body over. It was heavy to move even for Doctor Magiot. 'I'm glad your mother died when she did. She had borne enough. One Hitler is sufficient experience for a lifetime.' We talked in whispers for fear of disturbing the Smiths. 'A rabbit's foot,' he said,

'for luck.' He put the object back. 'And here is something heavy.' He took out my brass paper-weight in the shape of a coffin marked R.I.P. 'I never knew he had a sense of humour.'

'That's mine. He must have taken it from my office.'

'Put it back in the same place.'

'Shall I send Joseph for the police?'

'No, no. We can't leave the body here.'

'They can hardly blame me for a suicide.'

'They can blame you because he chose this house to hide in.'

'Why did he? I never knew him. I met him once at a reception. That's all.'

'The embassies are closely guarded. I suppose he believed in your English phrase, "An Englishman's home is his castle". He had so little hope he sought safety in a catchword.'

'It's the hell of a thing to find on my first night home.'

'Yes, I suppose it is. Tchekov wrote, "Suicide is an undesirable phenomenon".'

Doctor Magiot stood up and looked down at the body. A coloured man has a great sense of occasion - it isn't ruined by Western education: education only changes the form of its expression. Doctor Magiot's greatgrandfather might have wailed in the slave-compound to the unanswering stars: Doctor Magiot pronounced a short carefully phrased discourse over the dead. 'However great a man's fear of life,' Doctor Magiot said, 'suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance - so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.'