Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [63]
“I love Justin,” Annette told me the next day, “and he loves me. Oh! Claire, I’m so happy!”
We learned of her engagement at the same time we learned of Jane’s. Three months later, Justin died of pneumonia and Jane’s lieutenant in a car accident on his way to Port-au-Prince where he had been recalled.
Annette cried, then forgot. Jane, however, was pregnant. I was the first to whom she confessed this. Tattooed as I was by my bourgeois upbringing, I feared the responsibility and abandoned her in her distress. Her parents shut her away. She fled. I let her run without helping her. During the five years she lived in the lowly quarter where girls from good families were forbidden to go, I avoided talking to her or even greeting her. I think this is the only mistake for which I reproach myself. A few days after the death of the lieutenant, a new district commandant arrived by the name of Calédu.
With this name I will return to the present. Dawn rises on my sleepless night. I have tried to revive without too much distortion those I have known and those cut down by death. I don’t know to what extent I have succeeded. This resurrected past appeared to me as through a thick veil behind which I have evolved separate from my real self: an astonished spectator of my own life.
The corner grocer is the latest victim. I just learned this from an overexcited Mme Audier. This somewhat undermines Dr. Audier’s diagnosis regarding Calédu’s attacks against the bourgeois class. Mme Potiron’s little grocery has literally been pillaged.
“The agenda is not the same this time,” Dr. Audier explained to Jean Luze. “Believe me, Madame Potiron will not be tortured. The armed beggars have to eat, don’t they? Jacques Marti’s murder, the arrest of the poets, the arrest of the grocer, all reveal the excessive zeal of a soldier hoping to attract the attention of his superiors and earn distinction. But the torture inflicted on a certain category of women conceals something else.”
“What do you mean?” Jean Luze asked.
“Well, simply that our commandant must have often been humiliated by our beautiful bourgeois women and is now avenging himself in his own fashion.”
“Class again!” Jean Luze said, frowning.
“And color. I don’t think I need to tell you that in this black nation, color prejudice is as subtle and dangerous as in the United States.”
“Have the blacks in this country suffered that much?”
“To be honest, yes,” Audier confided, lowering his head.
“Does that really mean Calédu needs to act like a savage?” Félicia then said. “We’ve tried to accommodate his sensitivities. We opened our doors to him. What more can he want?”
“For you to welcome him as a friend, perhaps,” Dr. Audier answered, “or for one of our beautiful ‘aristocrats’ to agree to marry him.”
“Oh no! Never that!” Félicia protested. “The concessions to which we’ve stooped are quite enough. And besides, who but Annette could be to his liking? All we have left is a bunch of old hags.”
“Félicia, dear!” Jean Luze said, “take it easy, this topic always upsets you.”
“I hate them, I hate them,” she stammered, Jean Luze’s hand on her cheek. “Annette’s marriage has already lowered our standing. I kept quiet. I put up with everything. But it was horrible …”
“Now do you see what I mean?” Dr. Audier asked, shaking his head at Jean Luze. “I wasn’t exaggerating, as you can see.”
“Yes, but between us,” he answered, “Calédu and the others in power do nothing to make themselves likable. One is a vulgar criminal and the others are vile upstarts ready to do anything to fill their pockets. Surely there must be men of a different caliber somewhere in this country.”
“Well, you are beginning to get it, then, and for once you have come to the heart of the matter,” Dr. Audier said jubilantly “Do you think, my friend, that people worth their salt would act like Calédu or like Monsieur Trudor? They have been chosen precisely because of what they represent.