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“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,