Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [46]
“Has anyone here missed me at least?”
She sighs without giving us time to answer:
“Unfortunately, we have to go,” she adds, “some friends are expecting us. Did you see my tan? I live on the beach. Fortunately, this awful old-fashioned paleness is going away …”
She’s gone now. She waves one more time from the car. Her smile cuts dimples in her golden cheeks.
“It’s death here without Mademoiselle Annette,” Augustine suddenly blurts out.
She has dared to say what perhaps all of us were thinking, for habit indeed creates ties and even the most shallow human being leaves behind a void.
Irreproachable as he is toward his wife, the feeling he has for her, is that love? He lacks the spark, the joy the lightheartedness that love brings. Am I fooling myself? I still love him—that is, if love means melting with pleasure at the slightest movement of his hand, if it is unreserved admiration, or sharing common tastes in secret but not daring to give oneself away by speaking of them. How much longer will I be prey to this sterile passion? Am I going to settle for mind games for the rest of my life? I complicate things and, like a masochist, invent a thousand ways to torture myself. Idiot that I am, I did nothing with my youth, when naïveté lends self-confidence. I know too much now to lie to myself without revulsion. I know, for example, that only suffering would lead him to me. How love can make one cruel and sadistic! Am I not just like these torturers? I have suffered too much. It’s time for a truce. I will find it in a different way of life. Platonic love is a myth. Only freaks can settle for that. My love is full-bodied: it’s a nice mixture of sexual drive and lofty sentiment. Just what is necessary not to frighten the respectable woman I am.
I throw myself on my bed and wrap my arms around Jean Luze. I feel the weight of his body on mine. My dry lips always return me to my solitude. Alas, I am alone, alone. More and more I have come to hate these meager compensations, these proofs of my cowardice. Why aren’t you alone, too, Jean Luze? Why aren’t you free? I banish Félicia from my mind. Now I am really turning into a criminal! I am terrorizing myself. A long scream startles me. Someone is calling for help in the dark. I run to the window. I hear the clatter of weapons and a woman cry out. I imagine my neighbors, ears pricked up, trembling and listening like me, just as I imagine the woman in handcuffs being led away by Calédu. I press myself against the wall and open the window a crack. I can’t hear or see anything anymore. Everything has fallen into a kind of deathly silence. I’m surprised at the trembling of my hands and at my heaving rage. What does this have to do with me? And yet, I had the definite impression that, for a minute, I was prey to a dangerous and unbidden thought, one that I shook off willingly. The thought crosses my mind again in a flash. A flash of lightning flying like a dagger from my head, shining before my eyes like a sign. I hide my face in my hands and try to banish this terrible vision by sinking voluptuously into memories of the past.
Can that be me, the little girl hopping on one foot in the stairwell, with beaming eyes and joy in her heart? How old am I? Six, seven years old. All of that is so far away now. My first memories go back to those days. Before that I don’t exist. Suffering is the revelation that makes you aware of yourself. There must be some extraordinary significance to that age because that was when my parents became strict and suspicious toward me. I was reprimanded for no reason, spitefully watched. My mother put sewing work in my hands, and I spent most of my time sitting on a low chair at her feet. Every day my father called for me in a gruff voice to make me repeat my lessons, and pinched my ear hard enough to draw blood for the smallest error. “It clears the mind,” he would say to reassure me about his