The Comedians (27 page)

I saw Philipot isolated on his bench: all those around him had fallen back. He leant forward watching Joseph, and Joseph ran across the floor towards him, swinging the machete. He took Philipot's hair in his hand, and I thought he was going to strike him down with the machete. Then he forced Philipot's head back and poured the spirit down his throat. Philipot's mouth belched liquid like a drain-pipe. The bottle fell between them, Joseph revolved twice on the floor and fell. The drums beat, the girls chanted, Ogoun Ferraille had come and gone.

Philipot was one of the three men who helped carry Joseph into the room behind the
tonnelle
, but as for me I'd had enough. I went out into the hot night and drew a long breath of air, which smelt of wood-fire and rain. I told myself that I hadn't left the Jesuits to be the victim of an African god. The holy banners moved in the
tonnelle
, the interminable repetitions went on, I returned to my car, where I sat waiting for Joseph to come back. If he could move so agilely in the hut, he could find his way without my help. After a while the rain came. I closed the windows and sat in stifling heat, while the rain fell like an extinguisher over the
tonnelle
. The noise of the rain silenced the drums, and I felt as lonely as a man in a strange hotel after a friend's funeral. I kept a flask of whisky in the car against emergencies and I took a pull from it, and presently I saw the mourners going by, grey shapes in the black rain.

Nobody stopped at the car: they divided and flowed past on either side. Once I thought I heard an engine start – Philipot must have brought his car, but the rain hid it. I should never have gone to this funeral, I should never have come to this country, I was a stranger. My mother had taken a black lover, she had been involved, but somewhere years ago I had forgotten how to be involved in anything. Somehow somewhere I had lost completely the capacity to be concerned. Once I looked out and thought I saw Philipot beckoning to me through the glass. It was an illusion.

Presently when Joseph had not appeared I started the car and drove home alone. It was nearly four o'clock in the morning and too late to sleep, so that I was wide-awake at six when the Tontons Macoute drove up to the verandah steps and shouted to me to come down.

II

Captain Concasseur was the leader of the party and he held me at gun-point on the verandah while his men searched the kitchen and the servants' quarters. I could hear the bang of cupboards and doors and the screech of smashed glass. ‘What are you looking for?' I asked.

He lay on a wicker
chaise longue
with the gun in his lap pointing at me and at the hard upright chair on which I sat. The sun had not yet risen, but he wore his dark glasses all the same. I wondered whether he could see clearly enough to shoot, but I preferred to take no risks. He made no reply to my question. Why should he? The sky reddened over his shoulder and the palm trees turned black and distinct. I was sitting on a straight dining-room chair and the mosquitoes bit my ankles.

‘Or is it someone you're looking for? We have no refugees here. Your men are making enough noise to wake the dead. And I have guests,' I added with reasonable pride.

Captain Concasseur changed the position of his gun as he changed the position of his legs – perhaps he suffered from rheumatism. The gun had been pointing at my stomach; now it pointed at my chest. He yawned, his head went back, and I thought he had fallen asleep, but I couldn't see his eyes through his dark glasses. I made a slight movement to rise and he spoke immediately, ‘
Asseyez-vous
.'

‘I'm stiff. I want to stretch.' The gun was now pointing at my head. I said, ‘What are you and Jones up to?' It was a rhetorical question, and I was surprised when he answered.

‘What do you know about Colonel Jones?'

‘Very little,' I said. I noticed that Jones had risen in rank.

Then came an extra loud crash from the kitchen, and I wondered whether they were dismantling the range. Captain Concasseur said, ‘Philipot was here.' I kept silent, not knowing whether he meant the dead uncle or the live nephew. He said, ‘Before coming here he went to see Colonel Jones. What did he want with Colonel Jones?'

‘I know nothing. Haven't you asked Jones? He's a friend of yours.'

‘We use white men when we have to. We don't trust them. Where is Joseph?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Why isn't he here?'

‘I don't know.'

‘You drove out with him last night.'

‘Yes.'

‘You returned alone.'

‘Yes.'

‘You had a rendezvous with the rebels.'

‘You're talking nonsense. Nonsense.'

‘I could shoot you very easily. It would be a pleasure for me. You would have been resisting arrest.'

‘I don't doubt it. You must have had plenty of practice.'

I was frightened, but I was even more frightened of showing my fear – that would unleash him. Like a savage dog he was safer while he barked.

‘Why would you have arrested me?' I asked. ‘The embassy would want to know that.'

‘At four o'clock this morning a police station was attacked. One man was killed.'

‘A policeman?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good.'

He said, ‘Do not pretend that you have courage. You're very frightened. Look at your hand.' (I had wiped it once or twice against my pyjama trousers to get rid of the moisture.)

I gave a bad imitation of a laugh. ‘The night's hot. My conscience is quite clear. I was in bed by four o'clock. What happened to the other policemen? I suppose they ran away.'

‘Yes. We shall deal with them in due course. They left their arms behind, when they ran away. That was a bad mistake.'

The Tontons Macoute came streaming out of the kitchen-quarters. It was odd to be surrounded by men in sun-glasses in the murk of the early dawn. Captain Concasseur made a sign to one of them and he hit me on the mouth cutting my lip. ‘Resisting arrest,' Captain Concasseur said. ‘There has to be a struggle. Then, if we are polite, we will show your body to the chargé. What is his name? I forget names easily.'

I could feel my nerve going. Courage even in the brave sleeps before breakfast and I was never brave. I found it needed an effort to stay upright in my chair, for I had a horrible desire to fling myself at Captain Concasseur's feet. I knew the move would be fatal. One didn't think twice about shooting trash.

‘I will tell you what happened,' Captain Concasseur said. ‘The policeman on duty was strangled. He was probably asleep. A man with a limp took his gun, a
métis
took his revolver, they kicked open the door where the others were sleeping . . .'

‘And they let them get away?'

‘They would have shot my men. Sometimes they spare the police.'

‘There must be a lot of men with limps in Port-au-Prince.'

‘Then where is Joseph? He should be sleeping here. Someone recognized Philipot, and he is not at his home. When did you last see him? Where?'

He signalled to the same man. This time the man kicked me hard on the shin, while another snatched the chair from under me, so that I found myself where I didn't wish to be, at Captain Concasseur's feet. His shoes were a horrible red-brown. I knew that I had to get upright again or I would be finished, but my leg hurt me and I wasn't sure I could stand. I was in an absurd position sitting there on the floor as though at an informal party. Everyone was waiting for me to do my turn. Perhaps when I stood up they would kick me down again. That might be their idea of a party joke. I remembered Joseph's broken hip. It was safer to stay where I was. But I stood up. My right leg gave a shoot of pain. I leant back for support against the balustrade of the verandah. Captain Concasseur changed the position of his gun to cover me, but without any haste. He had an attitude of great comfort in the
chaise longue
. Indeed he looked as though he owned the place. Perhaps that was his intention.

I said, ‘What were you saying? Oh yes . . . I went last night with Joseph to a Voodoo ceremony. Philipot was there. But we didn't speak. I left before it was over.'

‘Why?'

‘I was disgusted.'

‘You were disgusted by the religion of the Haitian people?'

‘Every man to his taste.'

The men in sun-glasses came a little nearer. The glasses were turned towards Captain Concasseur. If only I could have seen one pair of eyes and the expression . . . I was daunted by the anonymity. Captain Concasseur said, ‘You are so frightened of me that you have pissed in your
pantalon
.' I realized that what he said was true. I could feel the wet and the warmth. I was dripping humiliatingly on the boards. He had got what he wanted, and I would have done better to have stayed on the floor at his feet.

‘Hit him again,' Captain Concasseur told the man.

‘
Dégoûtant
,' a voice said, ‘
tout à fait dégoûtant
.'

I was as astonished as they were. The American accent with which the words were spoken had to me all the glow and vigour of Mrs Julia Ward Howe's
Battle Hymn of the Republic
. The grapes of wrath were trampled out in them and there was a flash of the terrible swift sword. They stopped my opponent with his fist raised to strike.

Mrs Smith had appeared at the opposite end of the verandah behind Captain Concasseur, and he had to lose his attitude of lazy detachment in order to see who it was who spoke, so that the gun no longer covered me and I moved out of reach of the fist. Mrs Smith was dressed in a kind of old colonial nightgown and her hair was done up in metal rollers which gave her an oddly cubist air. She stood there firmly in the dawn light and let them have it in sharp fragmented phrases torn out of Hugo's Self-Taught. She told them of the
bruit horrible
which had roused her and her husband from their sleep; she accused them of
lâcheté
in striking an unarmed man; she demanded their warrant to be here at all – warrant and again warrant: but here Hugo's vocabulary failed her –
‘montrez-moi votre warrant'; ‘votre warrant où est-il?'
The mysterious word menaced them more than the words they understood.

Captain Concasseur began to speak, ‘Madame,' and she turned on him the focus of her fierce short-sighted eyes. ‘You,' she said, ‘oh, yes. I've seen you before. You are the woman-striker.' Hugo's had no word for that – only English could serve her indignation now. She advanced on him, all her hard-won vocabulary forgotten. ‘How dare you come here flourishing a revolver? Give it to me,' and she held out her hand for it as though he were a child with a catapult. Captain Concasseur may not have understood her English, but he understood very well the gesture. As though he were guarding a precious object from an angry mother, he buttoned the gun back inside the holster. ‘Get out of that chair, you black scum. Stand up when you speak to me.' She added, in defence of all her past, as though this echo of Nashville racialism had burnt her tongue, ‘You are a disgrace to your colour.'

‘Who is this woman?' Captain Concasseur asked me weakly.

‘The wife of the Presidential Candidate. You have met her before.' I think for the first time he remembered the scene at Philipot's funeral. He had lost his grip: his men stared at him through their dark glasses waiting for orders which didn't come.

Mrs Smith had recovered her grasp on Hugo's vocabulary. How she must have worked all that long morning when Mr Smith and I visited Duvalierville. She said in her atrocious accent, ‘You have searched. You have not found. You can go.' Except for the absence of certain nouns the sentences would have been suitable ones for the second lesson. Captain Concasseur hesitated. Too ambitiously she attempted both the subjunctive and the future tense and got them wrong, but he recognized very well what she intended to say, ‘If you don't go, I will fetch my husband.' He capitulated. He led his men out and soon they were going down the drive more noisily than they had come, laughing hollowly in an attempt to heal their wounded pride.

‘Who was that?'

‘One of Jones's new friends,' I said.

‘I shall speak to Mr Jones about it at the first opportunity. You can't touch pitch without . . . Your mouth is bleeding. You had better come upstairs and I will wash it in Listerine. Mr Smith and I never travel anywhere without a bottle of Listerine.'

III

‘Does it hurt?' Martha asked me.

‘Not much,' I said, ‘now.' I could not remember a time when we had been so alone and so at peace. The long hours of the afternoon faded behind the mosquito-netting over the bedroom window. When I look back on that afternoon it seems to me we had been granted the distant sight of a promised land – we had come to the edge of a desert: the milk and honey awaited us: our spies went by carrying their burden of grapes. To what false gods did we turn then? What else could we have done other than we did?

Never before had Martha come of her own will, unpressed, to the Trianon. We had never slept before in my bed. It was for half an hour only, but the sleep was deeper than any I have known since. I woke flinching from her mouth with my wounded gum. I said, ‘I received a letter of apology from Jones. He told Concasseur that he took it as a personal insult that a friend of his should be treated like that. He threatened to break off relations.'

‘What relations?'

‘God knows. He asked me to have a drink with him tonight. At ten. I shan't go.'

We could hardly see each other now in the dusk. Every time she spoke I thought it was to say that she could stay no longer. Luis was back in South America reporting to his Foreign Office, but there was always Angel. I knew that she had invited some friends of his for tea, but tea doesn't last very long. The Smiths were out – another meeting with the Secretary for Social Welfare. This time he had asked them to come alone, and Mrs Smith had taken the Hugo Self-Taught with her in case interpretations were required.