The Comedians

  ‘What about the police?’

  ‘The C.D. plate has some value.’

  I wondered which of us was using the other. I had not made love to a woman for some months and she – she had obviously reached the dead-end of most marriages. But I was crippled by the events of the day and I wished I had not come and I couldn’t help remembering she was German, even though she was too young to bear any guilt herself. There was only one reason for us both to be here and yet we did nothing. We sat and stared at the statue which stared at America.

  To escape from the absurdity I put my hand on her knee. The skin felt cold; she wore no stockings. I said, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Martha.’ She turned as she answered and I kissed her clumsily and missed her mouth.

  She said, ‘We needn’t, you know. We’re grown-up people,’ and suddenly I was back in the Hôtel de Paris and powerless, and no bird came to save me on white wings.

  ‘I only want to talk,’ she lied to me gently.

  ‘I would have thought you had plenty to talk about at the embassy.’

  ‘Last night – would it have been all right, if I could have come to your hotel?’

  ‘Thank God, you didn’t,’ I said. ‘There was trouble enough there.’

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘Don’t let’s talk about it now.’ Again, to disguise my lack of feeling, I acted crudely. I pulled her body out from under the wheel and thrust her across my thighs, scraping her leg on the radio-set, so that she exclaimed with pain.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  She settled herself more easily, she put her lips against my neck, but I felt nothing: nothing moved in me, and I wondered how long she would put up with her disappointment, if she were disappointed. Then for a long moment I forgot all about her. I was back in the midday heat knocking at the door of what had been my mother’s room and getting no response. I knocked and knocked, thinking that Marcel was in a drunken sleep.

  ‘Tell me about the trouble,’ she said. Suddenly I began to talk. I told her how the room-boy became anxious and then Joseph, and how finally, when there was no reply to my knocking, I used the pass-key and found that the door was bolted. I had to tear down the partition between two balconies and scramble from one to the other – luckily the guests were away swimming on the reef. I found Marcel hanging from his own belt from the centre light: he must have had great resolution, for he had only to swing a few inches to land his toes on the curlicued ends of my mother’s great bed. The rum had all been drunk except a little in the second bottle, and in an envelope addressed to me he had put what was left of the three hundred dollars. ‘You can imagine,’ I said, ‘how I’ve been occupied since. What with the police – and the guests too. The American professor was reasonable, but there was an English couple who said they were going to report it to their travel agent. Apparently a suicide places a hotel in a lower price-bracket. It’s not an auspicious beginning.’

  ‘It was a horrible shock,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know him or care about him, but it was a shock, yes, it really was a shock. Apparently I shall have to have the room purified by a priest or an houngan. I’m not sure which. And the lamp has to be destroyed. The servants insist on that.’

  It proved a relief to talk and with words desire came. The back of her neck was against my mouth and one leg spread-eagled across the radio. She shivered and her hand shot out and by bad chance fell on the rim of the wheel and set the klaxon crying. It went on wailing like a wounded animal or a ship lost in fog until the shiver stopped.

  We sat in silence in the same cramped position, like two pieces of machinery which an engineer had just failed to fit. It was the moment to say good-bye and go: the longer we stayed the greater demands the future would hold for us. In silence trust begins, contentment grows. I realized I had slept a moment, woken, and found her sleeping. Sleep shared was a bond too many. I looked at my watch. It was long before midnight. The cranes ground over the cargo-ships and the long procession of workers passed from boat to warehouse, bent under their cowls of sacks like capuchin monks. One leg hurt me. I shifted it and woke her.

  She struggled away and said sharply, ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Twenty to twelve.’

  ‘I dreamt the car had broken down and it was one in the morning,’ she said.

  I felt put in the place where I belonged, between the hours of ten and one. It was a daunting thought how quickly jealousy grows – I had barely known her for twenty-four hours and already I resented the demands of others.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘I was wondering when we shall see each other again.’

  ‘At the same time tomorrow. Here. This is as good as any other place, isn’t it? Take a different taxi-driver, that’s all.’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly an ideal bed.’

  ‘We’ll get in the back of the car. It will be all right there,’ she said with a precision that depressed me.

  So it was our affair began and so it continued with minor differences: for example, a year later she changed her Peugeot for a newer model. There were occasions – once her husband was recalled for consultation – when we escaped the car; once with the help of a woman-friend we passed two days together at Cap Haïtien, but then the friend went home. It sometimes seemed to me that we were less lovers than fellow-conspirators tied together in the commission of a crime. And like conspirators we were well aware of the detectives on our tracks. One of them was the child.

  I went over to a cocktail party at the embassy. There was no reason why I should not have been invited, for within six months of our meeting I had become an accepted member of the foreign community. My hotel was a modest success – though I was not content with modesty, and I still dreamt of that first-class cook. I had met the ambassador first when he drove one of my guests – a fellow-countryman – back to the hotel after a dinner at the embassy. He accepted and praised one of Joseph’s drinks, and the shadow of his long cigar lay for a while across my verandah. I have never heard a man use the word ‘my’ more frequently. ‘Have one of my cigars.’ ‘Please let my chauffeur have a drink.’ We spoke of the coming elections. ‘My opinion is the doctor will succeed. He has American support. That is my information.’ He invited me ‘to my next cocktail party’.

  Why did I resent him? I was not in love with his wife. I had ‘made’ her, that was all. Or so I believed at the time. Was it that in the course of our conversation he had discovered I had been educated by the fathers of the Visitation and claimed a kind of kinship – ‘I was at the College of St Ignatius’ – in Paraguay, Uruguay – who cares?

  I learnt later that the cocktail party to which in due course I was invited belonged to the second-class order, the first-class – where caviare was served – being purely diplomatic – ambassadors, ministers, first secretaries, while the third-class was purely ‘duty’. It was a compliment to be included in the second which was supposed to contain elements of ‘fun’. There were a number of rich Haitians there with wives of a rare beauty. The time had not yet come for them to flee the country or to remain shut in their houses at night for fear of what might happen to them in the dark curfewed streets.

  The ambassador introduced me to ‘my wife’ – ‘my’ again, and she led me to the bar to find me a drink. ‘Tomorrow night?’ I asked, and she frowned at me and pursed her lips to indicate I was not to speak – that we were under observation. But it was not her husband she feared. He was busy showing ‘my’ collection of Hyppolite’s paintings to one of his guests, moving from picture to picture, explaining each one, as though the subjects too belonged to him.

  ‘Your husband can’t hear in all this din.’

  ‘Can’t you see,’ she said, ‘that he is listening to every word?’ But the ‘he’ was not her husband. A small creature, not much more than three feet high, with dark concentrated eyes, was forcing his way towards us with the arrogance of a midget, thrusting aside the k
nees of guests as though they were the undergrowth of a wood which belonged to him. I saw he had his eyes on her mouth, as though he were lip-reading.

  ‘My son Angel,’ she introduced him, and always I thought of him after that in the English pronunciation of the name, like a kind of blasphemy.

  Once he had regained her side he hardly left it, though he never spoke at all – he was too busy listening, while his small steely hand grasped hers, like one half of a handcuff. I had met my real rival. She told me when we next met that he had asked a great many questions about me.

  ‘He smells something wrong?’

  ‘How could he at his age? He’s barely five.’

  A year passed, and we found ways of outwitting him, but his claims on her remained. I discovered she was indispensable to me, but when I pressed her to leave her husband, the child blocked her escape. She could do nothing to endanger his happiness. She would leave her husband tomorrow, but how could she survive if he took Angel from her? And it seemed to me that month by month the son grew more to resemble the father. He had a way now of saying ‘my’ mother, and once I saw him with a long chocolate cigar in his mouth; he was putting on weight rapidly. It was as though the father had incarnated his own demon to ensure that our affair did not go too far, beyond the bounds of prudence.

  There was a time when we took a room for meeting above a Syrian store. The store-keeper, whose name was Hamit, was completely reliable – it was just after the Doctor came to power, and the shadow of the future was there for anyone to see, black as the cloud on Kenscoff. Any kind of connexion with a foreign embassy had value for a stateless man, for who could tell at what hour he might not have to take political asylum? Unfortunately, though we had both closely examined the store, we did not realize that, in a corner behind the pharmaceutical products, there were a few shelves given up to toys of better quality than could be found elsewhere, and among the groceries, for the luxury trade had not yet entirely ceased, a tin of bourbon biscuits could occasionally be found, a favourite provender of Angel between meals. This led to our first big quarrel.

  We had already met three times in the Syrian room which contained a brass bed under a mauve silk counterpane and four hard upright chairs lined along the wall and a number of handtinted photographs of family groups. I think it was the guest-room, kept immaculate for some important visitor from Lebanon who never came and never would come now. The fourth time I waited for two hours and Martha did not appear at all. I went out through the store and the Syrian spoke to me discreetly. ‘You have missed Madame Pineda,’ he said. ‘She was here with her little boy.’

  ‘Her little boy?’

  ‘They bought a miniature car and a box of bourbon biscuits.’

  Later that evening she rang me up. She sounded breathless and afraid and she spoke very rapidly. ‘I am at the Post Office,’ she said, ‘I’ve left Angel in the car.’

  ‘Eating bourbon biscuits?’

  ‘Bourbon biscuits? How did you know? Darling, I couldn’t come to you. When I got to the shop I found Angel there with his nurse. I had to pretend I’d come to buy him something as a reward for being good.’

  ‘Has he been good?’

  ‘Not particularly. His nurse said they saw me come out last week – it was a good thing we never leave together – and he wanted to see where I’d been and that’s how he discovered the biscuits he liked.’

  ‘The bourbon biscuits.’

  ‘Yes. Oh, he’s coming into the Post Office now to find me. Tonight. Same place.’ The telephone went dead.

  So we met again by the Columbus statue in the Peugeot car. That time we didn’t make love. We quarrelled. I told her Angel was a spoilt child, and she admitted it, but when I said that he spied on her, she was angry, and when I said he was getting as fat as his father, she tried to slap my face. I caught her wrist and she accused me of striking her. Then we laughed nervously, but the quarrel simmered on, like stock for tomorrow’s soup.

  I said very reasonably. ‘You would do better to make a break one way or the other. This kind of life can’t go on indefinitely.’

  ‘Do you want me to leave you then?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But I can’t live without Angel. It’s not his fault if I’ve spoilt him. He needs me. I can’t ruin his happiness.’

  ‘In ten years he won’t need you at all. He’ll be slinking off to Mère Catherine or sleeping with one of your maids. Except that you won’t be here – you’ll be in Brussels or Luxembourg, but there are brothels for him there too.’

  ‘Ten years is a long time.’

  ‘And you’ll be middle-aged and I’ll be old – too old to care. You’ll live on with two fat men . . . And a good conscience, of course. You’ll have salvaged that.’

  ‘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 al
l 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

  DOCTOR MAGIOT 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.