The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe (24 page)

Anne Marie did not hide her irritation. “Unless what, Monsieur Lafitte?”

“Unless it wasn’t Vaton.”

“Of course it wasn’t Vaton. No reason for Madame Vaton to lie about her own daughter. Or at least, no reason that I can think of.” Anne Marie hesitated. “The real Vaton has a five-year-old child. If
Bouton’d seen traces of childbirth on the dead body, he’d’ve mentioned it.”

“Unless it wasn’t Vaton on the plane from France.”

Anne Marie frowned unhappily.

“Unless the driving license and the credit card were stolen before the flight.”

Anne Marie poured a second cup of coffee from the battered pot. The flow of coffee was comforting in its normality.

“
Madame le juge
, if the victim was using Vaton’s credit card here, she might just as well have been using it for her air ticket. It’s not as if she had to go through customs. Between here and Paris, all flights are internal. There’s no point where the ticket is checked thoroughly against a passport.”

“I suppose …”

“If the woman could steal Vaton’s credit card, she could have stolen her passport as well.” Lafitte grinned. “Perhaps we ought to check how the ticket was paid for.”

A beautiful girl, according to Trousseau.

Apart from a couple of pupils from the
lycée
who sometimes went windsurfing with Fabrice, Anne Marie did not know many girls.

Anne Marie did not know many people at all. Acquaintances, yes, and a lot of contacts, but socially she had never mixed in Guadeloupe. There was never time and she had always avoided the social functions she got invited to. In the early years, her only friends had been the family-in-law. Since the divorce, Jean Michel’s family had disappeared, partly in solidarity with Jean Michel, but mainly, Anne Marie suspected, out of embarrassment at the way things had turned out.

Two cracks in the wall of silence from the extended family-in-law were M’man Jeanne and Lucette.

Lucette had remained a good friend and a cheerful voice only a phone call away. During those awful months after the divorce, it was Lucette who had listened sympathetically to Anne Marie as she poured out her feelings over the telephone. Feelings of resentment and betrayal and self-doubt. And above all, a terrible loneliness.

Most probably, Anne Marie would have aborted without Lucette’s common sense advice. There would never have been Létitia, her little Létitia.

“Before going home this evening, I’ll go and see her. I’ve got to get up to the hospital to see the Indian. Lucette should be out of intensive care.”

“Who,
madame le juge
?”

“My sister-in-law—Mademoiselle Salondy.” Anne Marie knew she owed a lot to Lucette Salondy. “Do you know any beautiful girls, Monsieur Lafitte?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“According to Trousseau, there’s a pretty young woman who wishes to talk to me.”

“Pretty girls?” Lafitte rubbed his chin. “Apart from you,
madame le juge
?”

Anne Marie smiled at his spontaneity. “How’s your wife?”

“My wife?” Lafitte sounded surprised. “As well as can be expected.”

Anne Marie glanced at him but said nothing. With Lafitte walking beside her, she entered the
palais de justice
. Out of the sun the air was cool, and as they went toward the stairway, she heard the familiar plop of a terrapin falling back into the water of the pool.

Up the stairs.

Anne Marie had always loved the
palais de justice
with its airy, tropical lines, its grey-green stone floors and the beige paint. Although made of concrete, there was something Moorish about it that appealed to her North African sensibilities. The law courts had been built in the 1930s with money received from the Germans in war reparations. The building had the functional layout of architecture that exploited the trade winds and even on the hottest days of the hurricane season, it somehow remained cool within the
palais de justice
.

Lafitte reached the door first and opened it for her. She stepped past him and immediately noticed the perfume. Not the smell of Bastos and beer on Lafitte’s breath, not the smell of Trousseau’s overripe breadfruit in a plastic bag on the floor, but the fragrance of jasmine essence.

Trousseau was sitting at his desk, his arms folded and a proprietary smile on his face. He got up, stepped forward, one hand on the door handle, and shook hands with Lafitte. The satisfied grin was for Anne Marie.

Anne Marie put her bag on the desk and lowered herself onto the chair. The smell of jasmine was pleasant.

The effort of climbing the stairs had brought more pearls of sweat to Lafitte’s sallow forehead. He wiped his face with a handkerchief. “I’ll be wishing you a pleasant weekend,
madame le juge
,” he said. “I’ll check with Air France for the ticket.”

Lafitte nodded and quietly closed the door.

Anne Marie waited until they could no longer hear his footfalls on the stairs.

Marie Pierre Augustin was looking at Trousseau. “A policeman?”

He glanced from one woman to the other and ran a finger along his moustache. “Lafitte’s keeping tabs on you,
madame
.” He seemed pleased with himself.

“Lafitte’s a lonely man,” Anne Marie replied.

“Keeping tabs because he’s worried what dirt you’ll dig up on Dugain—and the SRPJ.”

“He’s one of these men who like to appear macho and yet desperately seek the reassurance of women.” Anne smiled at Marie Pierre. “They’re lost without us.”

Anne Marie could hear the fall of Trousseau’s fading footsteps on the stairs outside her office.

“You told me you were married.”

Marie Pierre nodded. “I married in Paris and we came out here. A big mistake.”

“Getting married?”

“Jean Claude wanted to return to the islands.”

“Jean Claude’s your husband?”

A thin smile. “Don’t ask me where he is now because I don’t know and I don’t want to know. All my life I’ve belonged to someone—someone who has owned me, someone who’s told me what to do. Not for my sake, but for their sake.” She folded her arms. “At last I’m free.”

“You live with a man. That’s what you told me yesterday afternoon.”

“I am free.”

“You didn’t want children?”

She was wearing a white lace-edged bustier showing the flawless ebony of her shoulders. “I was only eighteen when I married.”

“A lot of women have children at eighteen.”

“No point in bringing a child into this world if you can’t look after him. Children cost a lot of money.”

Anne Marie nodded. “Money and time.”

“I received very little of either. I was born in Martinique and when I was five, my mother took me to Paris to be operated on while my
father stayed on in the Caribbean. Like all men, he wasn’t capable of living by himself. He needed a woman … a woman to iron his shirts and to keep him warm in bed. So he found another woman.” She attempted a smile. “We remained in France. We were living with an aunt, Maman got a job working in a hospital and I married the first man I met.”

“Who brought you back to the Caribbean?”

“Jean Claude had grown up in France. He was twenty-three and a sergeant and they wanted him to go to officer school but he left the army because he was desperate to return to Guadeloupe. Fed up with France, fed up with the bad weather, fed up with the whites. As you’re white,
madame le juge
, you can’t understand. You can’t understand what it’s like to live every day of your life in a country where you don’t belong.”

“Like you, I had to emigrate to France.”

“Your father went off with another woman?”

“He didn’t have to.”

The girl frowned but Anne Marie felt no need to elucidate.

“We came to Guadeloupe and Jean Claude set up a garage and I got a job working in a beauty parlor. A good job.” A glimpse of even teeth between the parted lips. “There’s more to life than blow brushing.”

“Not if you’re happy.”

“I’ve never been happy … happy like other people.”

“A home, a job, a husband—that’s sufficient for most women.”

The girl unfolded her arms and picked up the glass. She drank some more cane juice. “Jean Claude’d been five years in the army and he’d worked as a mechanic. When we were engaged, we talked about what we were going to do. Jean Claude was full of theories. ‘
The islands are rich—with all those civil servants and their fat salaries
.’ In France—we were living in Asnières—the garage he was going to open in Guadeloupe, that was all he could talk about and I believed him.” She paused, breathing in. “You’d have thought that with my father I’d have learned my lesson, that I’d learned to be wary of men, but I am afraid you’d have thought wrong. Once we got here, it didn’t take long for things to unravel. He set up his garage and he started getting clients but when people brought a car in with a flat tire, of course he would repair the carburetor and give it a wax polish. A perfectionist,
Jean Claude, but he was surprised when they complained about the bill.” She heaved her chest. “Nothing went right.”

In the distance, the passenger ship gave a last, long hoot, before heading north. Antigua, St. Kitts, St. Martin, St. Thomas.

(Trousseau had brought drinks, cane juice and a bottle of mineral water. Then he had smiled knowingly as he left the two women.)

“We’d sunk all our savings into the garage—and it scarcely paid for the overalls. Jean Claude couldn’t bring himself to admit it was his fault. He should’ve cut his losses and pulled out, got a job, but he was looking for someone to blame. The fault of his family, it was the fault of his compatriots. Everybody’s fault but his own.”

“Sometimes it was the fault of his wife?”

“You’re married,
madame le juge
?”

“I was.”

“White men are supposed to be better. They’re supposed to listen to their wives, treat them like equals.”

“All men are selfish. The only difference is how well they hide their selfishness.”

For a moment Marie Pierre did not speak. Her hands were now motionless on her lap; a couple of crumbs from the croissant had fallen to the floor of the office. “We were staying with a cousin. He has a house at the top of a hill opposite the university. A nice enough place. A couple of cats, a pig and some chickens. I like being with animals. But I needed to get away. To a place of our own. I was still in love and it wasn’t our home. There was no privacy.”

“And there wasn’t any money?”

“Jean Claude grew more and more bitter. He started accusing me of not being like other women, of not caring about children, but there was no chance of my getting pregnant as long as there was no money coming in.”

“You had a job.”

“Thank goodness.” For a moment she hesitated, running the long, thin fingers across her forehead. “Jean Claude’s a good man—he isn’t violent, he never hit me or anything.”

“Why should he hit you?”

“I am not always the easiest person to live with.” An unexpected smile. “There are some things—things that men want—that I don’t …”

“Yes?”

“I don’t enjoy that sort of thing. I try to—but I don’t enjoy it.” The smile had vanished. “Then one fine day I lost my job—the woman hair dresser took on a girl without any qualifications because she was cheaper. I hate being unemployed, being left to sit with my thoughts. I looked everywhere. I even put adverts in the paper and went to people’s houses. But I didn’t have a car. Jean Claude couldn’t understand what I was going through. ‘We can have children,’ he kept saying, ‘that’ll give you something to do.’ Pretty soon I couldn’t bear being alone in the house with him so I found a job selling encyclopedias. Door-to-door selling, going into the projects and trying to sell twenty volumes of some cheapjack encyclopedia
—Creole Cooking
or
The History of the Black Woman
. Selling useless books to people who could scarcely read.”

“You could’ve returned to France?”

She suddenly noticed the crumbs on the short red skirt and brusquely brushed them away. “We had each other—and there were times when I felt close to Jean Claude. The magic had gone out of our married life—but he was a friend—my best friend. He can get carried away by an idea, and then for a few weeks he puts his heart and soul into it. Always working on some crackbrained idea for making money.” A smile stretched the deep gloss of the lipstick. “Jean Claude’s stubborn.” A flash of her white teeth. “I’m stubborn, too.”

“You left him?”

“When he started getting involved in politics. Suddenly everything was the fault of the whites. He’d spent most of his life in France, many of his friends were whites, friends from school and his days in the army. Then …” She stopped and shook her head. “He felt he had to explain why nothing was working out. Explain to everybody, but above all to himself.” She added, “We no longer slept together.”

“Nothing like parenthood to get a man to concentrate on finding a job.”

“Perhaps.”

“Why did you leave your husband?”

“Jean Claude never made bombs—I don’t think he was involved in anything like that. I certainly hope he wasn’t but he started reading political books and West Indian stuff. I remember there was a book he talked about
—The Wretched of the Earth
, written by a man in
Martinique. He started browsing through all the Caribbean encyclopedias I was supposed to sell. Even at night, in bed, he would talk politics. Marx—you know Karl Marx?”

“You were in the same bed?”

“The same bed—but I didn’t like him touching me. Not any more. After a while, he gave up.”

Anne Marie allowed herself to smile. “I used to be like that.”

“You didn’t like sex?”

“I was a Marxist a long time ago.”

“Bad enough when all he could talk about was the garage, but the politics was worse and he’d get angry with me. I couldn’t stand his denigrating the whites because I could remember the white doctors who’d been so good to me when I was little. He’d tell me I was a woman, that I was politically immature.” She breathed out, her nose pinched. “I’d roll over and try to go to sleep and when finally I did fall asleep, he would hold it against me and say I was stupid and unaware of what was happening in my own country. So when people came to the house—intellectuals, people at the university—he’d never introduce me to them. I was supposed to make the drinks and then disappear.”