Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [23]
“With a big doll lying on straw,” Annette concludes with a yawn.
Annette is neither pious nor chaste, everyone knows this and she is turning our world upside down with her makeup and her low neckline. She is much too fashionable for this narrow community. She recently pinched Father Paul’s cheek and called him a handsome old man. Fortunately, this happened at home.
Jean Luze is neither more distant nor more friendly toward her than a brother-in-law would be.
“Cigarette?”
He holds out his case. Annette’s cigarette shakes in her hand. She gets up from the table pretending that he’s not offering her a light. She gives herself away. Jean Luze’s attitude is as perfect as hers is false. She suffers and he has simply gone back to being himself.
There is a disturbing vitality in me, made even more dangerous because I’m holding it back. I am like a cunning bedbug lurking in a furniture crevice. I patiently wait to suck the blood of my prey. Jean Luze is my prey now. If he wants, for his own peace and quiet, to settle for his lukewarm marriage, I will manage to prevent him from doing so. For now, he’s on all fours trying to make it up to his wife. He immerses himself in their dull daily routine. But he’s going to get bored with it. I am going to be a great help to him in this matter and a lot more skillfully this time around. I realize there will be much to do. How he hurried back to nestle himself against Félicia’s chaste body! She is so proper, Félicia, so careful, so sensible! I imagine their embrace. I know all there is to know about perfect coitus in theory. I know several pages from Lady Chatterley’s Lover by heart. The book does not leave my nightstand: it’s my aphrodisiac.
Despite the cataclysms, my eyes see the immutable dawn, sky and sea in their colorful splendor. Indifferent to our misfortunes, a merrymaking sky parades in the soft colors of daybreak, and far away the sea, calm, serene, sprawls like a silvery blue sheet of oil. I breathe them in, absorb them with brand-new pleasure, a pleasure so childish it treacherously takes me back to the past. I hear my father’s voice echoing like a drum, the neighing of horses. I hear my mother talking and I hear Augustine, whom my mother has beaten, crying. I hear the piano under my clumsy fingers and my teacher, Mlle Verduré, yelling: “From the top, Claire, take it from the top!” The streets are cheerful. On the doorsteps, groups of men gather. Smoking the day’s first cigar, they share the political news gleaned from Port-au-Prince. The doors of the stores are open. European boats unload their merchandise on the pier, which teems with people of all classes. Vendors walk under our windows calling for their customers. “Madame Clamont,” they say, “I’ve got them here, your rice and beans, chickens and vegetables.” And my mother comes downstairs, leaning on Augustine, and sits on the porch to haggle. What has happened to Mme Bavière’s gorgeous store? And Duclan’s, where they sold French wines, liqueurs and boxes of chocolate of the best French brands? Ruined. One after the other, they went bankrupt. And the Syrians, like vultures, rushed for their remains and bought them up. They’re holding up well, the Syrians. They can compete with Haitians in any weather. “Unfair competition!” my raving father used to insist. “They’ve taken shelter under the wing of the European powers to benefit from their protection …”
“Down with the Syrians! Death to the Syrians,” added Dr. Audier and the other merchants. But it wasn’t the Syrians’ fault if my father lost his coffee fields before his death. His ruin can be chalked up to his fixation on becoming head of state someday. His lands were sold, piece by piece, to pay for ten years of campaigns. And my mother, who watched our dowries fall into the hands of his party activists, would weep in feeble protest.
There are people who let a fortune slip through their fingers and it’s usually not because