The Comedians (11 page)

‘Oh, but you must stay here, my dear. El Rancho – it wouldn't do – to advertise that joint,' she used the American expression. ‘After all – it was what I had to tell you – this hotel will be yours one day. Only I wanted to explain – the law is so complicated, one must take precautions – that it's in the form of shares, and I have left to Marcel a third interest. He will be very useful if you treat him right, and I had to do something for the boy, hadn't I? He has been rather more than a mere manager. You understand? You are my son, so of course you understand.'

‘I understand.'

‘I'm so glad you are here. I didn't want any little slip . . . Never underestimate a Haitian lawyer, when it comes to a testament . . . I'll tell Marcel that you'll take over the actual direction immediately. Only be tactful, that's a good boy. Marcel is very sensitive.'

‘And you, mother, rest quiet. If you can, don't think any more about business. Try to sleep.'

‘They say that to be dead is about as quiet as you can get. I don't see any point in my anticipating death. It lasts a long time.'

I put my lips again against the whitewashed wall. She closed her eyes in an artificial gesture of love, and I tiptoed away from her to the door. When I opened it very softly so as not to disturb her I heard a giggle from the bed. ‘You really are a son of mine,' she said. ‘What part are you playing now?' Those were the last words she ever said to me, and I am not sure to this day what exactly she meant by them.

I took a taxi to El Rancho and stayed there for dinner. The place was crowded, a buffet of Haitian food carefully adapted to American tastes was laid by the swimming-pool, a bony man in a conical hat performed lightning taps upon a Haitian drum, and it was then, on my first evening, I think, that the ambition was born in me to make the Trianon successful. For the moment it was too obviously a hotel of the second class. I could imagine the small tourists' agents who included it in their round-trip programmes. I doubted whether the profits could possibly satisfy both Marcel and myself. I was determined to succeed, in the biggest possible way: I would have the delight one day of sending the surplus guests uphill to El Rancho with my recommendation. And the strange thing was that my dream did come true for a short time. In three seasons I was able to transform the shabby place into the bizarre high spot of Port-au-Prince, and through three seasons I watched it die again, until now there were only the Smiths upstairs in the John Barrymore suite and Monsieur le Ministre dead in the bathing pool.

I paid my bill and took a taxi back down the hill and entered what I had already begun to regard as my sole property. Tomorrow I would go through the accounts with Marcel, I would interview the staff, I would take control. I was already planning how best to buy Marcel out, but that would have to wait until my mother had gone on to her further destiny. They had given me a big room on the same landing as hers. The furniture, she said, had all been paid for, but the floorboards needed renewal, they bent and creaked under my feet, and the only thing of value in the room was the bed, a fine large Victorian bed – my mother had an eye for beds – with big brass knobs. It was the first time I could remember that I had lain down to sleep in a bed I had not paid for with breakfast included – or had not been in debt for, as was the case at the College of the Visitation. The sensation was an oddly luxurious one and I slept well – until a jangling hysterical old-fashioned bell woke me, while I was dreaming – God knows why – of the Boxer Rebellion.

It rang and rang, and now I was reminded of a fire-alarm. I put on my dressing-gown and opened my door. Another door opened at the same moment from the same landing and I saw Marçel emerge, with a half-asleep look on his wide flat negro face. He wore a pair of bright scarlet silk pyjamas and he hesitated just long enough for me to see the monogram over the pocket: an
M
interlaced with a
Y
. I wondered what the
Y
stood for, until I remembered that my mother's Christian name was Yvette. Were the pyjamas a sentimental gift? I doubted that. More likely the monogram was an act of defiance on my mother's part. She had very good taste, and Marcel had a fine figure to swathe in scarlet silk, and she wasn't petty enough to mind what her second-rate tourists thought.

He saw me watching him and he said in a tone of apology, ‘She wants me.' Then he went slowly, with what seemed reluctance, to her door. I noticed that he didn't knock before he went in.

I had an odd dream when I got back to sleep – odder than the Boxer Rebellion. I was walking by the side of a lake in the moonlight and I was dressed like an altar-boy – I felt the magnetism of the still quiet water, so that every step I took was nearer to the verge, until the uppers of my black boots were submerged. Then a wind blew and the surge rose over the lake, like a small tidal wave, but instead of coming towards me, it went in the opposite direction, raising the water in a long retreat, so that I found I walked on dry pebbles and that the lake existed only as a gleam on the far horizon of the desert of small stones, which wounded me through a hole in my boots. I woke to an agitation that shook the stairs and floors throughout the hotel. Madame la Comtesse, my mother, was dead.

I was travelling light, my European suit was too hot to wear, and I had only a choice of gaudy sports-shirts to put on for the chamber of death. The one which I chose I had bought in Jamica; it was scarlet and covered with print taken from an eighteenth-century book on the economy of the islands. They had tidied my mother up by that time, and she lay on her back in a pink diaphanous nightdress wearing an ambiguous smile of secret or even sensual satisfaction. But her powder had caked a little in the heat, and I couldn't bring myself to kiss the hard flakes. Marcel stood by the bed, dressed correctly in black, and his face dripped with tears like a black roof in a storm. I had thought of him simply as my mother's last extravagance, but it was no gigolo who said to me in a tone of anguish, ‘It was not my fault, sir. I said to her again and again, “No, you're not strong enough. Wait just a little. It will be all the better if you wait”.'

‘What did she say?'

‘Nothing. She just took off the sheets. And when I see her like that it is always the same.' He started to leave the room, shaking his head as though to get the rain out of his eyes, and then he came hurriedly back, went down on his knees by the bed, and thrust his mouth against the sheet where it was rounded by her stomach. He knelt there in his black suit looking like some negro priest at an obscene rite. It was I, not he, who left the room, and it was I who went to the kitchen and set the servants to work again for the guests' breakfast (even the cook was partly incapacitated by tears), and it was I who telephoned to Doctor Magiot. (The telephone frequently worked in those days.)

‘She was a great woman,' Doctor Magiot said to me later, and ‘I hardly knew her' was all I could say in my stupefaction.

The next day I went through her papers to find her will. She had not been very tidy: the drawers of her desk were given up indiscriminately to bills and receipts in no order that I could detect; there was a confusion even in the years. Sometimes among a pile of laundry-receipts I came on what used to be called a
billet-doux
. One in English, written in pencil on the back of a hotel menu, said, ‘Yvette, come to me tonight. I am dying slowly. I long for the
coup de grâce
.' Was it from a hotel guest? I wondered whether she had kept it for the sake of the menu or of the message, for the menu was a very special one for some July 14 celebration.

In another drawer, which otherwise contained mainly tubes of glue, drawing pins, hair-slides, fountain-pen refills and paperclips was a china pig-bank. The pig was light, but it rattled all the same. I didn't want to break it open, but it seemed foolish to throw it away like that, unexamined, on the growing pile of lumber. When I cracked it apart I found a Monte Carlo roulette token for five francs like the one I had put in the chapel collection many decades ago and a tarnishing medal, attached to a ribbon. I couldn't make out what it was, but when I showed it to Doctor Magiot he recognized it. ‘The medal of the Resistance,' he said, and it was then that he added, ‘She was a great woman.'

The medal of the Resistance . . . I had had no communication with my mother during the years of the occupation. Had she earned it or had she filched it or had it been given her as a love-token? Doctor Magiot had no doubt at all, but I had difficulty in thinking of my mother as a heroine, though I had no doubt at all that she could have played the part, as she could have played the
grande amoureuse
with the English tourists. She had convinced the fathers of the Visitation of her moral rectitude, even against the dubious background of Monte Carlo. I knew very little of her, but enough to recognize an accomplished comedian.

However, though her bills were untidy, there was nothing untidy about her will. It was clear and precise, signed by the Comtesse de Lascot-Villiers and witnessed by Doctor Magiot. She had turned her hotel into a limited company and assigned a nominal share to Marcel, another to Doctor Magiot and one to her lawyer who was called Alexandre Dubois. She possessed the ninety-seven other shares, as well as the three transfers which were neatly pinned to the document. The company owned everything to the last spoon and fork and I was allotted sixty-five shares and Marcel thirty-three. I was to all intents the owner of the Trianon. I could begin at once to realize the dream of the night before – or only with such delay as the quick burial of my mother, a quickness entailed by the climate, presented.

In these arrangements Doctor Magiot proved invaluable; she was transported that very afternoon to the small cemetery in the mountain village of Kenscoff, where she was dug in with due Catholic rites among the small tombs and Marcel wept unashamedly by the grave, which looked like a hole dug for drains in a town street, for all around were the little houses the Haitians constructed for their dead; in them on the Feast of All Souls they would leave their bread and wine. While the ceremonial trowels of earth were deposited on the coffin, I wondered how best I could dispose of Marcel. We had been standing in the gloom of the ink-black clouds which always assembled over the mountain at that hour and now they broke on us with a dash and fury, and we ran for our taxis, the priest in the lead and the gravediggers bringing up the rear. I didn't know it then, but I know now that the diggers would not have returned before the morning to cover up my mother's coffin, for no one will work in a cemetery at night, unless it is a zombie who has left his grave at the command of an
houngan
to labour during the dark hours.

Doctor Magiot gave me dinner that night at his own home, and in addition he gave me a great deal of good advice which I was unwise enough to discount because I thought he might perhaps have an idea of obtaining the hotel for another client. It was the one share he possessed in my mother's company which made me suspicious even though I held the signed transfer.

He lived on the lower slopes of Pétionville in a house of three storeys like a miniature version of my own hotel with its tower and its lace-work balconies. In the garden grew a dry spiky Norfolk pine, like an illustration in a Victorian novel, and the only modern object in the room, where we sat after dinner, was the telephone. It was like an oversight in a museum arrangement. The heavy drape of the scarlet curtains, the woollen cloths on the occasional tables with bobbles at each corner, the china objects on the chimney-piece that included two dogs with the same gentle gaze as Doctor Magiot's, the portraits of the doctor's parents (coloured photographs mounted on mauve silk in oval frames), the pleated screen in the unnecessary fireplace, spoke of another age; the literary works in a glass-fronted bookcase (Doctor Magiot kept his professional works in his consulting-room) were bound in old-fashioned calf. I examined them while he was out ‘washing his hands', as he put it in polite English. There were
Les Misérables
in three volumes,
Les Mystères de Paris
with the last volume missing, several of Gaboriau's
romans policiers
, Renan's
Vie de Jésus
, and rather surprisingly among its companions Marx's
Das Kapital
rebound in exactly the same calf so that it was indistinguishable at a distance from
Les Misérables
. The lamp at Doctor Magiot's elbow had a pink glass shade, and quite wisely, for even in those days the electric current was erratic, it was oil-burning.

‘You really intend,' Doctor Magiot asked me, ‘to take over the hotel?'

‘Why not? I have a little experience of restaurant work. I can see great possibilities of improvement. My mother was not catering for the luxury trade.'

‘The luxury trade?' Doctor Magiot repeated. ‘I think you can hardly depend on that here.'

‘Some hotels do.'

‘The good years will not always continue. Not very long now and there will be the elections . . .'

‘It doesn't make much difference, does it, who wins?'

‘Not to the poor. But to the tourist perhaps.' He put a flowered saucer upon the table beside me – an ash-tray would have been out of period in this room where no one had ever smoked in the old days. He handled the saucer carefully, as though it were of precious porcelain. He was very big and very black, but he possessed great gentleness – he would never ill-treat, I felt sure, even an inanimate object, such as a recalcitrant chair. Nothing can be more inconsiderate to a man of Doctor Magiot's profession than a telephone. But when it rang once during our conversation he lifted the receiver as gently as he would have raised a patient's wrist.

‘You have heard,' Doctor Magiot said, ‘of the Emperor Christophe?'