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“He’s very cultivated for his age, Jean told me.”

“Bah! he’s a man all the same, isn’t he?”

“What do you expect? Intellectuals are interested in things besides women.”

“That’s a shame!”

Félicia yawns.

“But you yourself have nothing to complain about. Are you happy?” she asks Annette.

“Yes.”

“Paul is a good husband?”

“He’s a good lover.”

“What does that mean?”

Annette smiles wickedly and fixes a lock of hair on her lovely forehead.

“It means what it means. You’re no choir girl. It’s just that some husbands don’t do right by their wives. Making love is little more than an obligation for them. Wham bam, and that’s it! Such husbands are bad lovers; but others treat their wives like mistresses: they are good husbands and good lovers at the same time.”

“What theories!”

“Well, it’s not so bad in practice either, believe me.”

She said this protectively, sure of herself. Is she trying to diminish Jean Luze in Félicia’s eyes with these insinuating comparisons? Or was she offering her opinion of him in light of her more recent experience?

“I’m only telling you what Paul taught me,” she continues cruelly. “If a man is holding a woman in his arms and restrains himself, he’s either impotent or abnormal.”

I notice a worried look in Félicia’s eyes.

“Well, I assume that’s never happened to you,” she says weakly.

“It did, once.”

Félicia’s fingers curl around the arm of her chair.

“Ah! Well, what does any of this matter as long as people love each other,” she adds, annoyed.

“I used to think the same way before Paul.”

“So your Paul is a god?”

“No. He’s a black man and he knows how to take a woman. He is so passionate that all he would have to do is brush against your hand to desire you.”

“Don’t tell your friends about that.”

“I’ll kill anyone who comes near him.”

“You’re crazy,” Félicia replied simply.

But she was gasping.

The rain requires fresh processions, this time to make it stop. It’s raining interminably and, as luck would have it, right after the extensive clear-cutting of trees. For fifteen days, we have heard the whine of M. Long’s electric saw without interruption. A tree falls every five minutes. I crept around the coast yesterday to witness this bloodbath. Immense trees fell to the ground with what sounded like a great roar before their dying breath. The whole region had already been cleared and the peasants, harassed by Calédu, wore inscrutable, hostile, troubled faces. Avalanches of soil slid down the mountains and piled around their feet. Coffee is nothing but a memory for all of us. Timber export has replaced that business. When the wood is gone, he will go after something else. The slave trade, perhaps. He could easily ship hundreds from among the beggars. There’s been recent talk about hiring out peasants to cut sugarcane in the Dominican Republic. This was mentioned in the Port-au-Prince newspapers that Dr. Audier regularly receives. A commission composed of doctors, typists and accountants is expected to arrive next week. The human trade known as Operation Fight the Famine has begun. Is M. Long also getting in on the scheme? Word has spread and the peasants are abandoning their bleached, bled-dry land to watch the cars arriving from Port-au-Prince. Their number swells day by day.

I hear that they’ve been reduced to eating dogs at Lion Mountain. “Why not? We do eat beef and goat, after all,” Annette says. I can see it coming, we’ll soon turn into cannibals. Many of us find this entertaining. “Ugh! Eating dog! It must taste awful! And what criminal instincts these children have!” Mme Audier opines. Eugénie Duclan simply accuses them of being gluttonous and abnormal. “There’s no other way to understand it. Other people’s problems are their own business, of course, that’s as sure as death.”

“In the street I see people so filthy that I want to throw up,” Annette complains. “It’s disgusting. They could at least wash.”

She is pregnant and her husband has taken the habit of imposing her upon us more and more. Is it so she won’t get suspicious? He always claims to be detained by business