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“He is a joke, our little mayor,” Mme Camuse muttered in my ear that day. “He looks like a cheap sausage stuffed into that wool jacket. Look at the prefect’s wife! She’s got four bracelets on her fat arms and has hung a couple of chandeliers from her ears. Does she think she’s at a ball?”

She has kept her aristocratic lexicon. She’s not about to change at seventy-five. The sight of the Cercle occupied by armed beggars made her heartsick.

“They have taken over everything!” she groans. “Ah! Our good old days are really good and gone!”

There was a time when she ruled our district in high style, when she made her servants beat the drum and light the flame, when she organized cocktail parties at l’Étoile, when she presided at table opposite her late husband, who was dressed in his most elegant frock coat, when she angrily scratched out from the guest list names that were outrageously nouveau riche. Her time is no more. Annette and her peers have resigned themselves to this. Mme Camuse and Mme Audier think Annette is little more than a hussy. “A hussy,” they murmur to each other in the intimacy of their living room now sullied by the boots of Commandant Calédu and by the exceedingly shiny new shoes of the mayor and the prefect. It’s a cold war of resentment, rancor and hatred.

This morning, I brought Félicia her soup. Her belly is spilling out of her maternity blouse: a veritable sperm whale!

“Claire, my dearest,” she said to me, “Jean and I have chosen you to be godmother to our son.”

I smile and thank her. In my own fashion.

“Are you happy?”

“Of course I’m happy.”

I don’t want a child who is only a quarter mine. I want one who is completely mine. I don’t want to get attached to other people’s children. Even though life has denied me everything, I am not inclined to play the adoptive mother. I may kiss Jane’s son on his nice round cheeks but I remain detached, the door to my heart as solidly barricaded as the door to my bedroom.

Dr. Audier will be the godfather, naturally. He has served as witness to every wedding and stood godfather to every child born to the decent families, more or less. I will have a pleasant fellow godparent. A good guy, this doctor, who, despite his time in Paris, remained a classic Haitian country doctor to the core. He still forgets to tie his shoes and close his fly. Always a wet cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth; one time, by accident, some ash fell on Félicia’s belly. He’s the doctor the Luzes trusts, just as he was the one we trusted in the old days. In any case, we are hardly overwhelmed with options. And isn’t a doctor who studied in France something like a specialist? He continues to visit us every eight days, accompanied by his wife always caked in powder whiter than Pierrot. Does she still get her Antiphelic Milk15 by the case from Paris? No, for the French ships have deserted our ports. “My God,” she would moan coyly, “my complexion is getting darker!” … She is all honey when she talks to the prefect and all honey with Calédu as well. “Commandant,” she once said to him, “the uniform really suits you.”

For the moment, she feels obliged to moan like a polecat over the layette of the expected newborn.

Jean Luze chats with Dr. Audier. They dredge up memories of Paris. How and when the conversation turns, I can’t say. I only hear Dr. Audier answer:

“Yes, I am taking care of Dora Soubiran just as I have taken care of all the women beaten by Calédu. I suspect we’re dealing with a sadist who is avenging himself for his impotence with women. At least that’s my suspicion, because he’s also a bitter man who may simply be punishing others for their social status. His choice of victims reveals that much.”

“Why not complain?” Jean Luze asks.

“To whom?” Audier replies. “To the people who sent him to purge this town?”

“But how is it possible that there’s nothing you can do!”

“So you still don’t get it,” Dr. Audier said with despair. “People are right to say that no matter how educated they may be, foreigners can barely understand us even if they watch how we live for a hundred