Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [18]
Feel free to shriek at the top of your lungs if you ever see this manuscript; call me indecent, immoral. Sprinkle me with stinging epithets if it makes you happy, but you will not intimidate me anymore. I have wasted my time taking you seriously and ruined my life. I want revenge. I am swimming against the tide. I’m letting go, filling myself with rage. My life is not enough anymore. Eating, running the house, getting drunk on sleep, that’s not a life. I want something else. Just like you, just like everyone else. Our serene little faces, that’s just for the sake of appearances; our satisfied little smiles are for others to envy. It comforts, makes life easier when others think we are the blessed of this earth. No need for me to pry into your private life. I know what’s there. All private lives are alike. Why would you be different from me? Suffocating fear makes freaks of all of us. That’s why we take shelter behind a façade. When the façade crumbles, we are handed over to merciless judges worse than we are. Their status protects them. I fear them. They have taught me hypocrisy. In my awful loneliness, I have discovered that society isn’t worth shit. Society hides behind a barricade of idiocy. Society is a killer of liberty. Unless we shake off our yoke, we will come into this world, suffer, grow old, and die, always resigned to our fate. Life is not generous to many. What has she given me? Nothing. I failed to assert myself, and she forgot all about me. Every old maid, it seems, must have a cat or dog beside her. Eugénie Duclan has her cat and Dora Soubiran her dog. I don’t like animals. Their touch repels me. The faithful dog licking your feet and the sweetest cat watching you so it can leap on the table disgust me. They remind me of my inferiors. For fear of scandal, I have repressed an ocean of love within me. I have wasted my charms on self-absorbed solitude. My mating season has expired. I am a desert without refuge. It’s too late for me to start living. And yet everything lives around me as if to sharpen my regret, even the insects. I have more respect for them than for those who confine themselves to chastity and who flatter themselves that they have preserved their dignity. As if dignity were lodged somewhere in the body! The couples on my pornographic postcards offer me instruction on lovemaking: they attend to basic needs. The repressed have this in common: they exaggerate the importance of what they deny themselves. The priests conceal their desire under a skirt, the nuns under a veil, and yet they are both obsessed by it. “Our first duty is to avoid scandal,” my father, who lived a scandalous life, would say. He made a martyr of me, all for the sake of teaching me wisdom. Wisdom! I believed in this for a long time before discovering how empty it was. It’s debilitating. Happiness is fleeting. You need a touch of madness to catch it in its flight.
Annette did not come down for meals today. Neither did the Luzes. Since Félicia’s “indisposition,” Jean Luze comes home from work to lock himself up with her and I am alone in the dining room, putting together meals that I have Augustine send up. The house is quieter than a cemetery. As soon as Annette slips out, Jean Luze makes for the living room to listen to his music. I know his concerto by heart from hearing it so much. I love it as much as he does. It transports me so far away that when I return to myself, my nerves feel so naked that I find my daily life unbearable. Félicia, on the contrary, likes nothing that he likes. Music leaves her cold, books too. I secretly raid Jean Luze’s library. I have discovered real treasures on my own. Not even his science books put me off.
There is a crowd again on the main road. M. Long, with the prefect and the commandant at his side, tries to convince the peasants that the trees should be chopped down to sell the wood.
“Selling this wood will make you rich faster than coffee did,”