The Comedians (14 page)

‘And you? Don't tell me you won't have been comforted by all sorts of women in all sorts of ways.'

Our voices rose higher and higher in the darkness under the statue. Like all such quarrels it led to nothing except a wound which easily heals. There are places for so many different wounds before we find ourselves breaking an old scab. I got out of her car and walked across to mine. I sat down at the wheel and began to back the car. I told myself it was the end – the game wasn't worth the candle – let her stay with the beastly child – there were many more attractive women to be found at Mère Catherine's – she was a German anyway. I called, ‘Good-bye, Frau Pineda' viciously out of the window as I came parallel to her car, and then I saw her bent over the wheel crying. I suppose it was necessary to say good-bye to her once before I realized that I could not do without her.

When I got back beside her, she was already in control. ‘It's no good,' she said, ‘tonight.'

‘No.'

‘Shall we see each other tomorrow?'

‘Of course.'

‘Here. As usual?'

‘Yes.'

She said, ‘There is something I meant to tell you. A surprise for you. Something you badly want.'

For a moment I thought she was going to surrender to me and promise to leave her husband and her child. I put my arm round her to support her in the great decision and she said, ‘You need a good cook, don't you?'

‘Oh – yes. Yes. I suppose I do.'

‘We've got a wonderful cook and he's leaving us. I engineered a row on purpose and sacked him. He's yours if you want him.' I think she was hurt again by my silence. ‘Now don't you believe I love you? My husband will be furious. He said that André was the only cook in Port-au-Prince who could make a proper soufflé.' I stopped myself just in time from saying, ‘And Angel? He likes his food too.'

‘You've made my fortune,' I said instead. And what I said was nearly true – the Trianon soufflé au Grand Marnier was famous for a time, until the terror started and the American Mission left, and the British Ambassador was expelled, and the Nuncio never returned from Rome, and the curfew put a barrier between us worse than any quarrel, until at last I too flew out on the last Delta plane to New Orleans. Joseph had only just escaped with his life from his interrogation by the Tontons Macoute and I was scared. They were after me, I felt certain. Perhaps Fat Gracia, the head of the Tontons, wanted my hotel. Even Petit Pierre no longer looked in for a free drink. For weeks I was alone with the injured Joseph, the cook, the maid and the gardener. The hotel had need of paint and repairs, but what good was there in spending the labour without the hope of guests? Only the John Barrymore suite I kept in good order like a grave.

There was little in our love-affair now to balance the fear and the boredom. The telephone had ceased to work: it stood there on my desk like a relic of better times. With the curfew it was no longer possible for us to meet at night, while in the day there was always Angel. I thought I was escaping from love as well as politics when at last I received my exit visa at the police station after ten hours' wait, with the heavy smell of urine in the air and policemen returning with a smile of satisfaction from the cells. I remember a priest who sat all day in a white soutane and his stony attitude of long and undisturbed patience as he read his breviary. His name was never called. Pinned behind his head on the liver-coloured wall were the snapshots of Barbot, the dead defector and his broken companions who had been machine-gunned in a hut on the edge of the capital a month before. When the police sergeant gave me my visa at last, shoving it across the counter like a crust of bread to a beggar, someone told the priest that the police station was closed for the night. I suppose he came back next day. It was as good a place as any other for him to read his breviary, for none of the transients dared to speak to him, now that the Archbishop was in exile and the President excommunicated.

What a wonderful place the city had been to leave, as I looked down at it through the free and lucid air, the plane pitching in the thunderstorm which loomed as usual over Kenscoff. The port seemed tiny compared with the vast wrinkled wasteland behind, the dry uninhabited mountains, like the broken backbone of an ancient beast excavated from the clay, stretching into the haze towards Cap Haïtien and the Dominican border. I would find some gambler, I told myself, to buy my hotel, and I would then be as unencumbered as on the day I drove up to Pétionville and found my mother stretched in her great brothelly bed. I was happy to leave. I whispered it to the black mountain wheeling round below, I showed it in my smile to the trim American stewardess bringing me a highball of bourbon and to the pilot who came to report progress. It was four weeks before I woke to misery in my air-conditioned New York room in West 44th Street after dreaming of a tangle of limbs in a Peugeot car and a statue staring at the sea. I knew then that sooner or later I would return, when my obstinacy was exhausted, my business deal written off, and half a loaf eaten in fear would seem so much better than no bread.

CHAPTER
4

I

D
OCTOR
M
AGIOT
crouched a long time above the body of the ex-Minister. In the shadow cast by my torch he looked like a sorcerer exorcizing death. I hesitated to interrupt his rites, but I was afraid the Smiths might wake in their tower-suite, so at last I spoke to break his thoughts. ‘They can't pretend it to be anything but suicide,' I said.

‘They can pretend it to be whatever suits them,' he replied. ‘Do not deceive yourself.' He began to empty the contents of the Minister's left pocket which was exposed by the position of the body. He said, ‘He was one of the better ones,' and looked with care at each scrap of paper like a bank clerk checking notes for forgery, holding them close to his eyes and his big globular spectacles which he wore for reading only. ‘We took our anatomy course together in Paris. But in those days even Papa Doc was a good enough man. I remember Duvalier in the typhoid outbreak in the twenties . . .'

‘What are you looking for?'

‘Anything which could identify him with you. In this island the Catholic prayer is very apt – “The devil is like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour”.'

‘He hasn't devoured you.'

‘Give him time.' He put a notebook in his pocket. ‘We haven't the leisure to go through all this now.' Then he turned the body over. It was heavy to move even for Doctor Magiot. ‘I'm glad your mother died when she did. She had borne enough. One Hitler is sufficient experience for a lifetime.' We talked in whispers for fear of disturbing the Smiths. ‘A rabbit's foot,' he said, ‘for luck.' He put the object back. ‘And here is something heavy.' He took out my brass paper-weight in the shape of a coffin marked
R
.
I
.
P
. ‘I never knew he had a sense of humour.'

‘That's mine. He must have taken it from my office.'

‘Put it back in the same place.'

‘Shall I send Joseph for the police?'

‘No, no. We can't leave the body here.'

‘They can hardly blame me for a suicide.'

‘They can blame you because he chose this house to hide in.'

‘Why did he? I never knew him. I met him once at a reception. That's all.'

‘The embassies are closely guarded. I suppose he believed in your English phrase, “An Englishman's home is his castle”. He had so little hope he sought safety in a catchword.'

‘It's the hell of a thing to find on my first night home.'

‘Yes, I suppose it is. Tchekov wrote, “Suicide is an undesirable phenomenon”.'

Doctor Magiot stood up and looked down at the body. A coloured man has a great sense of occasion – it isn't ruined by Western education: education only changes the form of its expression. Doctor Magiot's great-grandfather might have wailed in the slave-compound to the unanswering stars: Doctor Magiot pronounced a short carefully phrased discourse over the dead. ‘However great a man's fear of life,' Doctor Magiot said, ‘suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance – so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.'

‘I thought that as a Catholic you would have utterly condemned . . .'

‘I am not a practising Catholic, and in any case you are thinking of theological despair. In this despair there was nothing theological. Poor fellow, he was breaking a rule. He was eating meat on Friday. In his case the sense of survival did not put forward a commandment of God as an excuse for inaction.' He said, ‘You must come down and take the legs. We have to remove him from here.' The lecture was finished, the funeral oration spoken.

It was a comfort to feel myself in the large square hands of Doctor Magiot. I was like a patient who accepts without question the strict régime required for a cure. We lifted the Secretary for Social Welfare out of the bathing-pool and carried him towards the drive where Doctor Magiot's car stood without lights. ‘When you get back,' Doctor Magiot said, ‘you must turn on the water and wash away the blood.'

‘I'll turn it on all right, but whether the water will come . . .'

We propped him on the back seat. In detective stories a corpse is always so easily made to look like a drunken man, but this dead thing was unmistakably dead – the blood had ceased to flow, but one glance into the car would note the monstrous wound. Luckily no one dared move on the roads at night; it was the hour when only zombies worked or else the Tontons Macoute. As for the Tontons they were certainly abroad; we heard the approach of their car – no other car would be out so late – before we reached the end of the drive. We switched our headlights off and waited. The car was being driven slowly uphill from the capital; we could hear the voices of the occupants arguing above the grind of the third gear. I had the impression of an old car which would never make the grade up the long slope to Pétionville. What would we do if it gave up the ghost at the entrance of the drive? The men would certainly come to the hotel for help and some free drinks, whatever the hour. We seemed to wait a long time before the sound of the engine passed the drive and receded.

I asked Doctor Magiot, ‘Where do we take him?'

‘We can't go far either up or down,' he said, ‘without reaching a block. This is the road to the north and the militia daren't sleep for fear of inspection. That's probably what the Tontons are doing now. They'll go as far as the police-post at Kenscoff if the car doesn't break down.'

‘You had to pass a road-block to get here. How did you explain . . . ?'

‘I said there was a woman sick after a childbirth. It's too common a case for the man to report, if I am lucky.'

‘And if he does report?'

‘I shall say I could not find the hut.'

We drove out on to the main road. Doctor Magiot put on the headlights again. ‘If anyone should be out and see us,' he said, ‘he will take us for the Tontons.'

Our choice of terrain was severely limited by the barrier up the road and the barrier down. We drove two hundred yards uphill – That will show that he passed the Trianon: he was not on the way there – and turned into the second lane on the left. It was an area of small houses and abandoned gardens. Here had lived in the old days the vain and the insufficiently successful; they were on the road to Pétionville, but they had not quite arrived there: the advocate who picked up the unconsidered cases, the failed astrologer and the doctor who preferred his rum to his patients. Doctor Magiot knew exactly which of them still occupied his house and who had fled to escape the forced levies that the Tontons Macoute collected at night for the construction of the new city, Duvalierville. I had contributed a hundred
gourdes
myself. To me the houses and gardens seemed all equally unlived in and uncared for.

‘In here,' Doctor Magiot directed. He drove the car a few yards off the road. We had to keep the headlights burning, for we had no hand free to hold a torch. They shone on a broken board which now announced only ‘. . . pont. Your Future by . . .'

‘So he's gone,' I said.

‘He died.'

‘A natural death?'

‘Violent deaths are natural deaths here. He died of his environment.'

We got the body of Doctor Philipot out of the car and dragged it behind an overgrown bougainvillaea where it could not be seen from the road. Doctor Magiot twisted a handkerchief round his right hand and took from the dead man's pocket a small kitchen knife for cutting steaks. His eye had been sharper than mine at the pool. He laid it a few inches from the Minister's left hand. He said, ‘Doctor Philipot was left-handed.'

‘You seem to know everything.'

‘You forget we took anatomy together. You must remember to buy another steak-knife.'

‘Has he a family?'

‘A wife and a boy of six. I suppose he thought that suicide was safer for them.'

We got back into the car and reversed into the road. At the entrance of my drive I got out. ‘All depends now on the servants,' I said.

‘They'll be afraid to talk,' Doctor Magiot said. ‘A witness here can suffer just as much as the accused.'

II

Mr and Mrs Smith came down to breakfast on the verandah. It was almost the first time I had seen him without a rug over his arm. They had slept well and they ate with appetite the grapefruit, the toast and the marmalade: I was afraid they might require some strange beverage with a name chosen by a public relations firm, but they accepted coffee and even praised its quality.