The Comedians (12 page)

‘Of course.'

‘Those days could return very easily. More cruelly perhaps and certainly more ignobly. God save us from a little Christophe.'

‘Nobody could afford to frighten away the American tourists. You need the dollars.'

‘When you know us better, you will realize that we don't live on money here, we live on debts. You can always afford to kill a creditor, but no one ever kills a debtor.'

‘Whom do you fear?'

‘I fear a small country doctor. His name would mean nothing to you now. I only hope you don't see it one day stuck up in electric lights over the city. If that day comes I promise you I shall run to cover.' It was Doctor Magiot's first mistaken prophecy. He underrated his own stubbornness or his own courage. Otherwise I would not have been waiting for him later beside the dry swimming-pool where the ex-Minister lay still as a hunk of beef in a butcher's shop.

‘And Marcel?' he asked me. ‘What do you propose to do with Marcel?'

‘I haven't decided. Tomorrow I must have a word with him. You know he owns a third of the hotel?'

‘You forget – I witnessed the will.'

‘It occurred to me that he might be ready to sell his shares. I have no cash, but I could probably borrow from the bank.'

Doctor Magiot put his great pink palms on the knees of his black formal suit and leant towards me as though he had a secret to convey. He said, ‘I would advise you to do the opposite. Let him buy your shares. Make it easy for him and let him buy them cheap. He is a Haitian. He can live on very little. He can survive.' But there again Doctor Magiot proved to be a false prophet. He saw the future of his country clearer than the fate of the individuals who composed it.

I said with a smile, ‘Oh no, I've taken a fancy to the Trianon. You'll see – I shall stay and I shall survive.'

I waited two days more before I spoke to Marcel, but in the interval I had a word with the bank manager. The last two seasons in Port-au-Prince had been good ones. I outlined my plans for the hotel, and the manager, who was a European, made no difficulty in advancing me the money I needed. The only point on which he proved difficult was the rate of repayment. ‘You are virtually asking me to repay in three years?'

‘Yes.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, you see, before that there are the elections.'

I had hardly seen Marcel since the funeral. Joseph, the barman, came to me for orders, the cook and the gardener came to me, Marcel had abdicated without a fight, but I noticed when I passed him on the stairs that he smelt strongly of rum, so I had a glass of it ready for him when we came together at last to talk. He listened without a word and he accepted what I had to say without dispute. What I offered him was a lot of money in Haitian terms, and I offered it in dollars and not
gourdes
, even though it represented half the nominal value of his shares. For psychological effect I had the money on me in hundred-dollar bills. ‘You had better count them,' I told him, but he put the money in his pocket without checking it. ‘And now,' I said, ‘if, you will sign here,' and he signed without reading what he signed. It was as easy as that. No scene at all.

‘I'll need your room,' I said, ‘from tomorrow.' Was I harsh to him? What partly influenced me was the embarrassment of dealing with my mother's lover, and it must have been awkward for him too to meet her son, a man much older than himself. Just before he left the room he spoke of her. ‘I pretended not to hear the bell,' he said, ‘but she rang again and again. I thought she might need something.'

‘But she only needed you?'

He said, ‘I am ashamed.'

I could hardly have discussed with him the powerful influence of my mother's sexual desires. I said, ‘You haven't finished your rum.' He drained the glass. He said, ‘When she was angry with me or when she loved me she called me “You big black beast.” That is what I feel now, a big black beast.' He went out of the room, one buttock heavily swollen with hundred-dollar bills, and an hour later I watched him going down the drive, carrying an old cardboard suitcase. He had abandoned in his room the scarlet silk pyjamas with the monogram
YM
.

For a week after that I heard nothing from him. I was very busy at the hotel. The only one who really knew his job was Joseph (I made him famous later for his rum punches), and I could only suppose that our guests were so used to eating badly at home, they accepted the cook's dishes as just an inseparable feature of human life. He served over-cooked steaks and ice-cream. I found myself living almost entirely on the grapefruit which he found it hard to spoil. The season was nearly at an end and I longed for the last guest to go, so that I could give the cook his quietus. Not that I knew where to find his successor – good cooks were not easy to find in Port-au-Prince.

One night I felt a strong need to forget the hotel, so I took myself to the casino. In those days, before Doctor Duvalier came to power, there were enough tourists to keep three roulette tables busy. You could hear the music from the night club below, and occasionally a woman in evening dress, tired of dancing, would bring her partner to the tables. Haitian women are the most beautiful in the world, I think, and there were faces and figures there which would have made a fortune for their owners in a Western capital. And always for me in a casino was the sense that anything might happen. ‘Man has but one virginity to lose,' and I had lost mine that winter afternoon in Monte Carlo.

I had been playing for several minutes before I saw that Marcel was sitting at the same table. I would have shifted, but I had already won once
en plein
. I have a superstition that only a single table each night is lucky and tonight I had found my lucky table, for in twenty minutes I was already a hundred and fifty dollars to the good. I caught the eye of a young European woman across the table. She smiled and began to follow my stakes, saying a word to her companion, a fat man with an enormous cigar, who fed her with tokens and never played himself. But the table which was so lucky for me was unlucky for Marcel. Sometimes we placed our stakes on the same square and then I lost. I began to wait until he had laid his tokens before I placed my bet, and the girl, who saw what I was at, followed suit. It was as though we were dancing in step – as in a Malayan ron-ron – without touching. I was content because she was pretty and because I remembered Monte Carlo. As for the fat man I could deal with that trouble later. Perhaps he too belonged to the Banque de l'Indochine.

Marcel was following a mad system. It was as though he were bored with the game and the quicker he lost the quicker he could leave the table. Then he saw me and shovelling together the remainder of his tokens he laid them all on zero which had not come up for more than thirty turns. He lost, of course, as one always loses with a desperate throw, and he pushed back his chair. I leant across to him with a ten-dollar token. ‘Have a bit of my luck,' I said.

Was I trying to humiliate him, to remind him that he had been my mother's paid lover? I don't remember now, but if that was my motive, I certainly failed. He took the token and replied with great courtesy in his careful French, ‘
Tout ce que j'ai eu de chance dans ma vie m'est venu de votre famille
.' He bet again on zero and zero came up – I hadn't followed him. He returned me my token and said, ‘Excuse me. I must go away now. I have a great need to sleep.' I watched him leave the
salle
. He had over three hundred dollars to change now. He was off my conscience. And though he was certainly very black and very big, it was unfair, I thought, to have called him, as my mother had done, a beast.

Somehow all the seriousness was drained out of the
salle
when he left. We were all small-timers now, playing for fun, risking nothing and gaining nothing but the price of a few drinks. I raised my winnings to three hundred and fifty dollars and dropped them to two hundred only for the pleasure of seeing the man with the cigar lose a little too. Then I stopped. Exchanging my tokens I asked the cashier who the girl was.

‘Madame Pineda,' he said, ‘a German lady.'

‘I don't like Germans,' I said with disappointment.

‘Nor do I.'

‘Who is the fat man?'

‘Her husband – the ambassador.' He named some small South American state, but I forgot it the next moment. I used to be able to distinguish one South American republic from another by the postage stamps, but I had left my collection behind at the College of the Visitation, as a gift to the boy whom I considered my greatest friend (I have long forgotten his name).

‘I don't like ambassadors much either,' I told the cashier.

‘They are a necessary evil,' he replied, counting out my dollar notes.

‘You believe that evil is necessary? Then you're a Manichean like myself.' Our theological discussion could go no further, for he had not been educated at the College of the Visitation, and in any case the girl's voice interrupted us. ‘Husbands too.'

‘What about husbands?'

‘A necessary evil,' she said, putting down her tokens on the cashier's desk.

We admire the qualities which are beyond our reach; so I admired loyalty, and at that moment I nearly walked away from her for ever. I don't know what restrained me. Perhaps I detected in her voice another quality which I find admirable – the quality of desperation. Desperation and truth are closely akin – the desperate confession can usually be trusted, and just as it is not given to everyone to make a deathbed confession, so the capacity for desperation is granted to very few, and I was not one of them. But she had it and it excused her in my eyes. I would have done better to have followed my first thought and walked away, for I would have walked away from a lot of unhappiness. Instead I waited for her at the door of the
salle
while she picked up her winnings.

She was the same age as the woman I had known in Monte Carlo, but time had reversed our ages. The first woman had been old enough to be my mother, and now I was old enough to be this stranger's father. She was very dark and small and nervous – I would never have taken her for a German. She came towards me counting her dollars, to hide her timidity. She had made a desperate cast, and now she didn't know what to do with the bite at the end of her line.

I asked, ‘Where's your husband?'

‘In the car,' she said and looking out I noticed for the first time the Peugeot car with the
C
.
D
. plates. In the front seat beside the wheel the big man sat smoking his long cigar. His shoulders were wide and flat. You could have hung a poster on them. They looked like a wall closing a cul-de-sac.

‘When can I see you again?'

‘Here. Outside in the car park. I can't come to your hotel.'

‘You know who I am?'

‘I ask questions too,' she said.

‘Tomorrow night?'

‘At ten. I must be back at one.'

‘And now – will he want to know what's kept you?'

‘He has infinite patience,' she said. ‘It is a diplomatic quality. He waits to speak till the political situation is ripe.'

‘Then why must you be back at one?'

‘I have a child. He always wakes around one and calls for me. It's a habit – a bad habit. He has nightmares. About a robber in the house.'

‘Your only child?'

‘Yes.'

She touched my arm and at that moment the ambassador in the car put out his right hand and sounded the horn, twice but not too impatiently. He didn't even turn his head or he would have seen us.

‘You're summoned back,' I said, and with my first claim on her the shadow of other claims fell on me.

‘I suppose it's nearly one.' She added quickly, ‘I knew your mother. I liked her. She was real.' She went out to the car. Her husband opened the door for her without turning, and she got behind the wheel: the end of his cigar glowed beside her cheek, like a warning lamp at the edge of a road under repair.

I went back to the hotel and Joseph met me on the steps. He said that Marcel had come back half an hour before and asked for a room for the night.

‘Only for tonight?'

‘He say he go tomorrow.'

He had paid in advance, putting down the sum which he knew to be correct, he had ordered two bottles of rum to be sent up, and he asked if he might have the room of Madame la Comtesse.

‘He could have had his old room.' But then I remembered that the new guest – an American professor – was there.

I wasn't unduly troubled. In a way I was touched. I was glad that my mother had been so liked by her lover, and by the woman in the casino whose first name I had forgotten to ask. I would have liked her myself perhaps if she had given me half a chance. Perhaps I had in mind the hope that her likeability might have been passed on to me – a great advantage in business – as well as two-thirds of her hotel.

IV

I was nearly half an hour late when I found the car with the
C
.
D
. sign outside the casino. There had been a great deal to keep me, and I was not really in the humour to come at all. I couldn't pretend to myself that I was in love with Madame Pineda. A bit of lust and a bit of curiosity was all I thought I felt, and driving into town I remembered everything in the register against her, that she was a German, that she had made the first move, that she was an ambassador's wife. (I would certainly hear the chandeliers and the cocktail glasses tinkle in her conversation.)

She opened the car door for me. ‘I nearly gave you up,' she said.

‘I'm sorry. A lot of things have happened.'