The Comedians (24 page)

Mrs Smith remarked, a little stiffly I thought, but perhaps it was in my imagination, ‘Don't hurry away, Mrs Pineda, because of us. Mr Smith and I are just off to bed. Come along, dear.'

‘I have to go in any case. My son has mumps, you see.' She was explaining too much.

‘Mumps?' Mrs Smith said. ‘I'm so sorry to hear it, Mrs Pineda. In that case you will certainly want to be at home.'

‘I'll see you to your car,' I said and got her away. We drove to the end of the drive and stopped.

‘What went wrong?' Martha asked.

‘You shouldn't have given me a letter addressed to you in my handwriting.'

‘I wasn't prepared. It was the only one I had in my bag. She couldn't have seen.'

‘She sees an awful lot. Unlike her husband.'

‘I'm sorry. What shall we do?'

‘We can wait until they are in bed.'

‘And then creep by and see the door open suddenly and Mrs Smith . . .'

‘They're not on my floor.'

‘Then we'll meet her for certain at the corner of the stairs. I can't.'

‘Another meeting spoilt,' I said.

‘Darling, that first night when you returned, by the pool . . . I wanted so much . . .'

‘They still have the John Barrymore suite just overhead.'

‘We can get under the trees. And the lights are out now. It's dark. Even Mrs Smith can't see in the dark.'

I felt an inexplicable reluctance. I said, ‘The mosquitoes . . .' trying to account for it.

‘Damn the mosquitoes.'

The last time we had been together we quarrelled because of her unwillingness. Now it was my turn. I thought angrily: If her house must not be defiled, why should my house be any less sacred? And then I wondered, sacred to what? A dead body in a bathing-pool?

We left the car and went as softly as we could towards the pool. A light was on in the Barrymore suite and the shadow of a Smith passed across the mosquito-netting. We lay down in a shallow declivity under the palms like bodies given a common burial, and I remembered another death, Marcel hanging from the chandelier. Neither of us would ever die for love. We would grieve and separate and find another. We belonged to the world of comedy and not of tragedy. The fire-flies moved among the trees and lit intermittently a world in which we had no part. We – the uncoloured – were all of us too far away from home. I lay as inert as
Monsieur le Ministre
.

‘What's the matter, darling? Are you angry about something?'

‘No.'

She said humbly, ‘You don't want me.'

‘Not here. Not now.'

‘I angered you last time. But I wanted to make it up.'

I said, ‘I never told you what happened that night. Why I sent you away with Joseph.'

‘I thought you were protecting me from the Smiths.'

‘Doctor Philipot was lying dead in the pool, just over there. You see that patch of moonlight . . .'

‘Killed?'

‘He had cut his own throat. To escape the Tontons Macoute.'

She moved a little away. ‘I understand. Oh God, it's terrible, the things that happen. They are like nightmares.'

‘Only the nightmares are real in this place. More real than Mr Smith and his vegetarian centre. More real than ourselves.'

We lay quietly side by side in our grave, and I loved her as I had never done in the Peugeot or the bedroom above Hamit's store. We approached one another by words more nearly than we had ever approached by touch. She said, ‘I envy you and Luis. You believe in something. You have explanations.'

‘Have I? Do you think I still believe?'

She said, ‘My father believed too.' (It was the first time she had ever mentioned him to me.)

‘In what?' I asked.

‘In the God of the Reformation,' she said. ‘He was a Lutheran. A pious Lutheran.'

‘He was lucky to believe in anything.'

‘And people in Germany too cut their throats to escape his justice.'

‘Yes. The situation isn't abnormal. It belongs to human life. Cruelty's like a searchlight. It sweeps from one spot to another. We only escape it for a time. We are trying to hide now under the palm trees.'

‘Instead of doing anything?'

‘Instead of doing anything.'

She said, ‘I almost prefer my father.'

‘No.'

‘You know about him?'

‘Your husband told me.'

‘At least he wasn't a diplomat.'

‘Or a hotel-keeper who depends on the tourist trade?'

‘There's nothing wrong in that.'

‘A capitalist waiting for the dollars to return.'

‘You speak like a Communist.'

‘Sometimes I wish I were.'

‘But you are Catholics, you and Luis . . .'

‘Yes, we were both brought up by the Jesuits,' I said. ‘They taught us to reason, so at least we know the kind of part we play now.'

‘Now?'

We lay there, holding each other, for a long while. Sometimes I wonder whether it was not the happiest moment we ever knew together. For the first time we had trusted each other with something more than a caress.

III

We drove out next day to Duvalierville, Mr Smith and I and the Minister with a Tonton Macoute for a driver; perhaps he was there to protect us, perhaps to observe us, perhaps just to help us pass the road-blocks, for this was the road to the north along which, as most people in the city hoped, the tanks from Santo Domingo would one day come. I wondered what good the three shabby militiamen at the road-block would be then.

Hundreds of women were flocking into the capital for market, riding side-saddle on their
bourriques
; they stared at the fields on either side and paid us no attention: we didn't exist in their world. Buses went by, painted in stripes of red and yellow and blue. There might be little food in the land, but there was always colour. The deep blue shadows sat permanently on the mountain slopes, the sea was peacock-green. Green was everywhere in all its varieties, the poison-bottle green of sisal slashed with black, the pale green of banana trees beginning to turn yellow at the tip to match the sand at the edge of the flat green sea. The land was stormy with colour. A big American car went by with reckless speed on the bad road and covered us with dust, and only the dust lacked colour. The Minister brought out a bright scarlet handkerchief and dabbed his eyes.

‘
Salauds
!' he exclaimed.

Mr Smith put his mouth close to my ear and whispered, ‘Did you see who those people were?'

‘No.'

‘I do believe one of them was Mr Jones. I may have been mistaken. They went very fast.'

‘It seems unlikely,' I said.

On the flat shoddy plain between the hills and the sea a few white one-room boxes had been constructed, a cement playground, and an immense cockpit which among the small houses looked almost as impressive as the Coliseum. They stood together in a bowl of dust which, when we left the car, whirled around us in the wind of the approaching thunderstorm: by night it would have turned to mud again. I wondered, in the wilderness of cement, where the notional bricks had come from for Doctor Philipot's coffin.

‘Is that a Greek theatre?' Mr Smith asked with interest.

‘No. It's where they kill cocks.'

His mouth twitched, but he put the pain away from him: to feel pain was a kind of criticism. He said, ‘I don't see many folk around here.'

The Secretary for Social Welfare said proudly, ‘There were several hundred on this very spot. Living in miserable mud huts. We had to clear the ground. It was quite a major operation.'

‘Where did they go?'

‘I suppose some went into town. Some into the hills. To relatives.'

‘Will they come back when the city's built?'

‘Oh well, you know, we are planning for a better class of people here.'

Beyond the cockpit there were four houses built with tilted wings like wrecked butterflies; they resembled some of the houses of Brasilia seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

‘And who will live in these?' Mr Smith asked.

‘These are for tourists.'

‘Tourists?' Mr Smith asked.

Even the sea had receded out of sight; there was nothing anywhere but the great cockpit, the cement field, the dust, the road, and the stony hillside. Outside one of the white boxes a negro with white hair sat on a hard chair under a sign that showed him to be a justice of the peace. He was the only human being in sight – he must have had a lot of influence to be installed so soon. There was no sign of men working, though a bulldozer stood on the cement playground with one wheel detached.

‘The visitors who come to see Duvalierville.' He led us nearer to one of the houses: it was no different from the other boxes except for the useless wings which I could imagine dropping off in the hard rains. ‘Now one of these – they are designed by our finest architect – might do for your centre. You wouldn't have to begin then on a bare site.'

‘I had thought of something larger.'

‘You could take over the whole group.'

‘What would happen to your tourists then?' I asked.

‘We would build some more over there,' he said, waving his hand at the dry insignificant plain.

‘It seems a bit out of the world,' Mr Smith said gently.

‘We are going to house five thousand people here. For a start.'

‘Where will they work?'

‘We shall bring industries to them. The Government believes in decentralization.'

‘And the cathedral?'

‘It will be over there, beyond the bulldozer.'

Around the corner of the great cockpit came seesawing one other human being. The justice of the peace was not after all the sole inhabitant of the new city. It already had its beggar too. He must have been sleeping in the sun, until he was woken by our voices. Perhaps he thought that the architect's dream had come true and there really were tourists in Duvalierville. He had very long arms and no legs and he moved imperceptibly nearer like a rocking-horse. Then he saw our driver and his dark glasses and his gun, and he stopped. Instead he set up a crooning murmur, and from under his torn cobweb of a shirt he drew a small wooden statuette which he held out towards us.

I said, ‘You have your beggars then.'

‘He is no beggar,' the Minister explained, ‘he is an artist.'

He spoke to the Tonton Macoute who went and fetched the statuette; it was the figure of a half-naked girl indistinguishable from dozens in the Syrian stores that waited for gullible tourists who never came now.

‘Let me make you a present,' the Minister said, handing the statuette to Mr Smith who took it with embarrassment. ‘An example of Haitian art.'

‘I must pay the man,' Mr Smith said.

‘No need. The Government looks after him.' The Minister began to lead the way back to the car, his hand on Mr Smith's elbow to guide him over the broken ground. The beggar rocked to and fro, making sounds of melancholy and desperation. No words were distinguishable; I think he had no roof to his mouth.

‘What is he saying?' Mr Smith asked.

The Minister ignored the question, ‘Later,' he said, ‘we will have a proper art centre here where the artists can live and relax and get their inspiration from nature. Haitian art is famous. Our pictures are collected by many Americans, and there are examples in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.'

Mr Smith said, ‘I don't care what you say. I'm going to pay that man.' He shook off the protecting hand of the Secretary for Social Welfare and ran back towards the cripple. He pulled out a bunch of dollar bills and held them out. The cripple looked at him with incredulity and fear. Our driver made a motion to interfere, but I blocked his way. Mr Smith bent down and pressed the money into the cripple's hand. The cripple with an enormous effort began to rock back towards the cockpit. Perhaps he had a hole there in which he could hide the money . . . There was an expression of rage and disgust on the driver's face as though he had been robbed. I think he contemplated drawing his gun (his fingers went to his belt) and putting an end to at least one artist, but Mr Smith was coming back along his line of fire. ‘He's made a sale all right,' Mr Smith said with a satisfied smile.

The justice of the peace had risen to watch the transaction outside his box beyond the playground – standing he was an enormous man. He put his hand over his eyes to see better in the hard sunlight. We took our places in the car, and there was a momentary silence. Then the Secretary said, ‘Where would you like to go now?'

‘Home,' said Mr Smith laconically.

‘I could show you the site we have chosen for the college.'

‘I've seen enough,' Mr Smith said. ‘I'd rather go home if you don't mind.'

I looked back. The justice of the peace was running fast on long loping legs across the cement playground, and the cripple was rocking back with desperation towards the cockpit; he reminded me of a sand-crab scuttling to its hole. He had only another twenty yards to go, but he hadn't a chance. When I looked round a minute later Duvalierville was hidden by the dust-cloud of our car. I said nothing to Mr Smith, for he was smiling happily at a good action accomplished; I think he was already rehearsing the story he would tell to Mrs Smith, a story which would enable her to share his sense of happiness.

After we had gone a few miles the Minister said, ‘Of course the tourist site is partly the responsibility of the Secretary for Public Works, and the Secretary for Tourism would also have to be consulted, but he is a personal friend of mine. If you cared to make the necessary arrangements with me, I would see that the others were satisfied.'