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I can’t help it, I like his reactions. Even looking at him through others’ eyes, he does not disappoint me. Or maybe I can’t be objective when it comes to him. I know passion blinds, that one lends people and things whatever color one wishes. That’s how one day I got it into my head to water a pretty plant Annette had brought back from Bob Charivi’s, marveling at how it seemed to revive with cool water. I only realized my idiocy when I heard my sister laughing because the plant was in fact artificial.

“No doubt my eyesight is going,” was the excuse I tried to make.

By what miracle had I seen this plant sparkle at the touch of water? Ideas are powerful, mysteriously so. Doesn’t everything, good and bad, have its own smell? I have always compared people to pure or rancid things, depending on what I associate them with. I have to admit that when it comes to Jean Luze the comparisons are more and more flattering Temperaments made of whole cloth displease me. I don’t like the born killer or the long-suffering saint. There is both violence and gentleness in this man, strength and weakness. Could he, frail and pure as he is, appease this swamp of desires that at times reduces me to a sordid little beast?

This morning, Annette announced her plans to marry.

“What?” Félicia cried out, but caught herself quickly. “I congratulate you, Annette,” she added, lowering her eyes.

“Good for you,” Jean Luze said simply.

“Do you like Paul?”

“You’re marrying him, not me, right?”

His tone seemed equivocal, as if he was nursing some rancor. Or is he, like us, simply unhappy about this match?

“Claire,” Annette told me afterward, “get ready to spend a tidy sum. What I want is a really beautiful lace dress. And you, Jean, what will you give me? At the store there is a gold bracelet I like.”

“It’s yours,” he replied simply.

“Find a way to order my trousseau from another town. Even the Syrian stores are going bankrupt here and all you can find is junk,” she added.

“Monsieur Trudor,” Jean Luze suggested enigmatically, “travels often enough to Port-au-Prince. Surely he could do a favor for his future daughter-in-law.”

“Now, that’s a terrific idea,” Annette replied.

Félicia waited for Annette to leave, then looking irate she said to me:

“A black man! A black man in our family. And one of the lowest sort! Can you believe this?”

“My God!” Jean Luze said, stroking her hair indulgently, “there is no need to get worked up about this.”

“It’s not so much the color of his skin that I mind, but his vulgarity and especially his father,” she stammered, a little ashamed of herself.

The wedding preparations have turned the house upside down. Annette comes in from time to time with lingerie that she displays on the dining room table for us admire: bras, nightgowns, slips, nothing is left out. And Jean Luze must give his opinion. He knows about such things, she insists, he’s traveled a great deal.

She opens her arms, buoyant and charming.

“Oh, if only I could go away, far, far away!”

She leans toward Jean Luze.

“Tell us some stories,” she begs him. “What was your life like? What did you used to do? You must have been with so many women …”

He gets up. A little too abruptly.

“I don’t like telling stories,” he said coldly, “and I never had much time to carry on with women …”

He walks away. I look at Félicia. Her eyes follow him with concern.

“He never talks about his past,” she says slowly, “never …”

“Not even to you?” Annette asks.

“Not even to me.”

She gets up.

He has confided in me though. Does he trust me so much that he would honor me with secrets he keeps from his wife? Or is it that he can let himself go with an old maid, telling her snippets of his life from time to time precisely to spare the one he loves, to keep her away from what’s past in order to preserve present love and future joys for her? Too bad! I will still have secrets to share with him, a painful, miserable past that I will help him bear. How I wish I could be sure he has never really confided in Félicia …

The baby is still quite ugly. He snores softly in