Marie Vieux-Chauvet: Love, Anger, Madness

Despite the ruins, despite the poverty, our little town remains beautiful. I realize this once in a while, in jolts of awareness. Habit destroys pleasure. I often walk past the sea and the mountains that frame the horizon in complete indifference. And yet, devastated as they are by erosion, the mountains are heartbreakingly beautiful. From a distance, the dried-up branches of the coffee bushes take on soothing pastel tones, and the shore is embroidered with foam. A smell of kelp seems to rise from the depths of the water. Small boats are tied to stakes on the shore. Their white sails stain the sea as the sky dives in and blends into the water. Once a week, we hear the American ship blow its horn. The only one moored in our port now, it leaves loaded with fish, coffee and precious wood. Our colonial-style house, part of its roof carried away by the wind in the last storm, is sixty years old. Each side leans on another house, Dora Soubiran’s on one side and Jane Bavière’s on the other-two childhood friends with whom we no longer associate for separate but equally valid reasons. Other houses, twins to ours, line the Grand-rue on both sides and are at odds with the modern villa of the new prefect, M. Trudor, a figure of authority whom everyone greets with a bow. We have lost our smugness and will greet anyone with a bow. Many a spine has been bent by all this scraping. M. Trudor hosts receptions to which all the former mulatto-bourgeois-aristocrats are invited. And the latter, taking thick skins out of their closets along with their silk dresses, respond promptly even as they grouse. One has to howl with the wolves, after all. And since the times have changed everything, we are making an effort to adapt. A few of us get our ears boxed, but Annette, bon vivant of the day that she is, takes care to represent us without overlooking a single invitation.

The rocky main street, just about demolished since the hurricanes, has been hollowed out by greenish ditches where mosquitoes nest. The mayor, a plump griffe [3] with a taste for women and liquor, has other fish to fry. The decaying street is not among his preoccupations. He whiles away his time at the corner grocer’s, Mme Potiron, a grimelle [4] who sells clairin [5] infused with herbal aphrodisiacs. Beggars shivering with fever squat beside the ditches and cup their hands in the stinking water to drink it. In the narrow streets, some dilapidated shacks, holding on as well as they can atop their nearly ruined foundations, shelter suspect-looking families with hollow cheeks. A few poets hunted by the cops-who don’t trust what they call “the intellectuals”-also live there. The police are worried for nothing, since we have become as gentle as lambs and more cautious than turtles. Our endless civil wars have ages ago become the stuff of epic legend, regarded with a smile by our youth.

In the midst of this squalor, the prefect lives in style in his villa. He does not earn much, but he is rich.

“The good Lord has punished you,” he sighs when beggars hold out their hands.

“The good Lord is unhappy with you,” Father Paul echoes from his pulpit. “You are giving in to superstition. You practice voodoo. God has punished you.”

In the thirty years he has lived in this country and fought this religion, he hasn’t yet understood that nothing will ever uproot it. In order not to believe in it, in order not to seek the protection of the gods, one has to free oneself once and for all of everything, one has to shake the yoke of any divinity and count only on one’s own strength. Which I have done. But how can you stop this ignorant people from clinging to something they see as a life raft, when even its representatives, when even my own father, the Parisian mulatto, served his loas [6] regularly.

My door is double-locked and I keep a key in my pocket. I do not let anyone in, not even my sisters. Still, just in case, I have hidden under my bed the romance novels I devour and the pornographic postcards sold to me one night on a deserted street corner by a suspicious young man with glasses, who was freshly arrived from Port-au-Prince and who fortunately vanished without a trace.

There is no such thing as purity, and the needs of the flesh are normal. Can anyone live without eating or drinking? I twist on my bed, prey to desires that nothing slakes. I close my bedroom window and make sure that my door is locked and take off my clothes. I am naked, in the mirror still beautiful. But my face is withered. I have bags under my eyes and wrinkles on my forehead. The graceless face of a love-starved old maid. I hate Félicia for having brought this man home. My temptation. My awful and delicious temptation! When they leave the bedroom, I go and touch, I smell the sheets on which they made love, starving for this smell of seaweed mixed with male sweat, which must be the smell of sperm and which blends with Félicia’s bland perfume.

Annette no longer has Bob Charivi drive her home. Rain or shine, she walks home. It is a tactic like any other, designed to move Jean Luze. I concur with this tactic. I want Annette to be Jean Luze’s. I want her to take Félicia’s place in that man’s life. I don’t like Félicia. She is too white, too blond, too lukewarm, too orderly. Ah! If only I had Annette’s youth. As I am, I would never dare. I only have to look at my face, prematurely aged, to withdraw immediately. A wasted face! I blame it on frustration, for which I reproach myself. Why did Jean Luze choose Félicia?

I remember his arrival in this country, one morning last year around this time. A rented car, covered in mud and dust, with a black driver behind the wheel, stopped in front of our house by chance. All the shutters lifted at once and the newcomers fell under the scrutiny of the curious eyes behind our yellowed and dusty lace curtains. I was sweeping the porch. He opened his door and walked up to me. Did he take me for the maid? He barely greeted me and asked where he could find the office of M. Long, the American, the director of the Export Corporation; I pointed it out to him. Later on when he returned for a visit with Dr. Audier, who explained that M. Luze had come here with the intention of collaborating with the Export Corporation, Annette made arrangements to seduce him. As for me, he hardly seemed to notice me. Only when Dr. Audier said, “May I introduce you to the Clamont girls?” did I see him fix his eyes upon me in astonishment. In that moment all the complexes, of which I had thought myself to be definitively cured, were roused in me. His amused gaze took in the living room, grazed Annette, and stopped on Félicia. She looked up at him with eyes full of fright and admiration, as she beheld him with parted lips. I think I loved him from the very first minute. Unfortunately, I was too practiced in the art of deception, and behind my mask of detachment, I burned in silence like a torch. Rigid, stuffy, suspicious like a cop, I would make the most resourceful prospects run away. Even long before, with Frantz Camuse and Justin Rollier, two acceptable suitors, I was unable to react. True, at that time I would shrink because I was self-conscious about my dark skin, which our acquaintances hypocritically pretended was a most unusual phenomenon.

“She is so different from her sisters!” “Who does she look like?” But under their breath, they added: “This one really fell off the oven rack.”

Furthermore, I imagined sexual relations, caresses, even kisses, to be shameful acts that only the Church could absolve through the sacrament of marriage. Raised on absurd primers that drilled it into me, throughout my entire youth, that love is a sin, cloistered in this house, in this town which I had only left twice to go to Port-au-Prince escorted by my parents, I lived surrounded by people for the most part no more enlightened than my tutors. Shamefaced, I learned to repress my instincts. Any intimacy with those who did not belong to the highest level of society meant dishonor for my parents. Their narrow-mindedness influenced me to such an extent that the only people who existed as far as I was concerned were those we received at home. My mother avoided greeting any woman suspected of adultery, while my father found all women depraved. He was a womanizer, so he knew what he was talking about. To please such parents, you had to live like a recluse so as to escape malicious gossip, which was as damning in their eyes as the fault itself.