The Comedians

  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.

  Now I thought I heard a door slam, and I said to Martha, ‘I think the Smiths are back.’

  ‘I don’t care about the Smiths,’ she said. She put her hand on my chest and said, ‘Oh, I’m tired.’

  ‘A good tired or a bad tired?’

  ‘A bad tired.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ It was a stupid question in our position, but I wanted to hear the words I often spoke, on her own tongue.

  ‘I’m tired of not being alone. I’m tired of people. I’m tired of Angel.’

  I said in amazement, ‘Angel?’

  ‘Today I gave him a whole box of new puzzles. Enough to occupy him for a week. I wish I could have that week with you.’

  ‘A week?’

  ‘I know. It’s not long enough, is it? This isn’t an adventure any more.’

  ‘It stopped being that when I was in New York.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Somewhere from far away in the town came the sound of shots. ‘Somebody’s being killed,’ I said.

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’ she asked.

  Two more shots came.

  ‘I mean about the executions?’

  ‘No. Petit Pierre hasn’t been up for days. Joseph has disappeared. I’m cut off from news.’

  ‘As a reprisal for the attack on the police station, they’ve taken two men from the prison to shoot them in the cemetery.’

  ‘In the dark?’

  ‘It’s more impressive. They’ve rigged up arc-lights with a television camera. All the schoolchildren have to attend. Orders from Papa Doc.’

  ‘Then you’d better wait for the audience to disperse,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. That’s all it means to us. We aren’t concerned.’

  ‘No. We wouldn’t make very good rebels, you and I.’

  ‘I don’t imagine Joseph will either. With that damaged hip.’

  ‘Or Philipot without his Bren. I wonder if he’s got Baudelaire in his breast-pocket to stop the bullets.’

  ‘Don’t be too hard on them,’ she said, ‘because I’m German and the Germans did nothing.’ She moved her hand as she spoke and my desire came back, so that I didn’t bother to ask her what she meant. Not with Luis safely away in South America and Angel occupied with his puzzles and the Smiths out of sight and hearing. I could imagine the taste of milk on her breasts and the taste of honey between her thighs and I could imagine for a moment that I was entering the promised land, but the spasm of hope was soon over, and she spoke as though her thoughts had not for a moment left their furrow. She said, ‘Haven’t the French a word for going into the street?’

  ‘My mother must have gone into the streets I suppose, unless it was her lover who gave her the Resistance medal.’

  ‘My father went into the streets too in 1930, but he became a war-criminal. Action is dangerous, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve learnt from their example.’

  It was time to dress and go downstairs. Every stair down was a stair nearer Port-au-Prince. The Smiths’ door stood open and Mrs Smith looked up as we went by. Mr Smith sat with his hat in his hands, and she had laid her hand on the back of his ne
ck. After all, they were lovers too.

  ‘Well,’ I said as we walked to the car, ‘they’ve seen us. Afraid?’

  ‘No. Relieved,’ Martha said.

  I went back into the hotel and Mrs Smith called to me from the first floor. I wondered whether, like one of the old inhabitants of Salem, I was to be denounced for adultery. Would Martha have to wear a scarlet letter? I have no idea why, but I had assumed them to be puritan because they were vegetarian. Yet it was not the passion of love which was caused by acidity, and they were both enemies of hate. I went reluctantly upstairs and found them in the same attitude. Mrs Smith said with an odd note of defiance as though she had read my thoughts and resented them, ‘I would have liked to have said good evening to Mrs Pineda.’

  I put it as blackly as I knew how, ‘She had to hurry home to her child,’ and Mrs Smith did not so much as wince. She said, ‘She is a woman I would have liked to know better.’ Why had I assumed it was only for the coloured races that she felt charity? Was it my guilt which had deciphered disapproval on her face the other night? Or was she the kind of woman who, when she had once tended a man, forgave him everything? I had been shriven perhaps by the Listerine. She took her hand from her husband’s neck to lay it on his hair.

  I said, ‘It’s not too late. She’ll come back another day.’

  ‘We go home tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Mr Smith despairs.’

  ‘Of a vegetarian centre?’

  ‘Of everything here.’

  He looked up and there were tears in the old pale eyes. What an absurd fancy it had been for him to pose as a politician. He said, ‘You heard the shots?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We passed the children on the way from school.’ He said, ‘I had never conceived . . . when we were freedom-riders, Mrs Smith and I . . .’

  ‘One can’t condemn a colour, dear,’ she said.

  ‘I know. I know.’

  ‘What happened with the Minister?’

  ‘The meeting was a short one. He wanted to attend the ceremony.’

  ‘Ceremony?’

  ‘At the cemetery.’

  ‘Does he know you are leaving?’

  ‘Oh yes, I had made my decision before – that ceremony. The Minister had been thinking the affair over and he had come to the conclusion that I was not after all a sucker. The alternative was that I was as crooked as himself. I had come here to get money, not to spend it, so he showed me a method – it only meant splitting three ways, instead of two, with someone in charge of public works. As I understood it I would have to pay for some materials but not for many materials, and they would really be bought out of our share of the pickings.’

  ‘And how were they going to get the pickings?’

  ‘The Government would guarantee wages. We would hire the labour at a much lower wage, and at the end of a month the labourers would be dismissed. Then we’d keep the project idle for two months and afterwards engage a fresh lot of workers. Of course the guaranteed wages during the idle months would go into our own pockets – apart from what we paid out for materials and the commission on these would keep the head of the Public Works Ministry – I think it was the Public Works Ministry – happy. He was very proud of the scheme. He pointed out that in the end there might even possibly be a vegetarian centre.’

  ‘The scheme sounds full of holes to me.’

  ‘I didn’t let him go into the details. I think he would have patched up all the holes as they occurred – patched them up out of the pickings.’

  Mrs Smith said with sorrowful tenderness, ‘Mr Smith came here with such high hopes.’

  ‘You too, dear.’

  ‘One lives and learns,’ Mrs Smith said. ‘It is not the end.’

  ‘Learning comes easier to the young. Forgive me, Mr Brown, if I sound kind of dejected, but we didn’t want you to misunderstand our leaving your hotel. You have made us very welcome. We have been very happy here under your roof.’

  ‘I’ve been glad to have you. Are you catching the Medea? She’s due back tomorrow.’

  ‘No. We won’t wait for her. I’ve written out our address for you at home. We are going to fly to Santo Domingo tomorrow and we’ll stay there a few days at least – Mrs Smith wants to see Columbus’s tomb. I’m expecting some vegetarian literature to arrive here on the next boat. If you will be kind enough to redirect it . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry about the centre. But, you know, Mr Smith, it would never have done.’

  ‘I realize that now. Perhaps we seem rather comic figures to you, Mr Brown.’

  ‘Not comic,’ I said with sincerity, ‘heroic.’

  ‘Oh, we’re not made at all in that mould. I’ll say good night to you, Mr Brown, now, if you’ll excuse me. I’m feeling kind of exhausted this evening.’

  ‘It was very hot and damp in the city,’ Mrs Smith explained, and she touched his hair again as though she were touching some tissue of great value.

  CHAPTER 3

  I

  NEXT day I saw the Smiths off at the airport. There was no sign of Petit Pierre, and yet surely the departure of a Presidential Candidate rated one paragraph in his column, even though he would have had to omit the final macabre scene which took place outside the Post Office. Mr Smith asked me to stop the car in the centre of the square, and I thought he intended to take a photograph. Instead he got out, carrying his wife’s handbag, and the beggars approached from all directions – there was a low babble of half-articulated phrases, and I saw a policeman run down the steps of the Post Office. Mr Smith opened the handbag and began to scatter notes – gourdes and dollars indiscriminately. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said. One or two of the beggars gave high unnerving screams: I saw Hamit standing amazed at the door of his shop. The red light of evening turned the pools and mud the colour of laterite. The last money was scattered, and the police began to close in on their prey. Men with two legs kicked down men with one, men with two arms grasped those who were armless by their torsos and threw them to the ground. As I hustled Mr Smith back into my car, I saw Jones. He sat in a car behind his Tonton driver and he looked bewildered, worried, for once in his life lost. Mr Smith said, ‘Well, my dear, I guess they won’t squander that any worse than I would have done.’

  I saw the Smiths on to their plane, dined alone, and then drove to the Villa Créole – I was curious to see Jones.

  The chauffeur was slumped at the bottom of the stairs. He watched me with suspicion, but he let me pass. A voice from the landing above cried angrily, ‘La volonté du diable,’ and a negro, who flashed a gold ring under the light, went by me.

  Jones greeted me as though I were an old school friend whom he had not seen for years, and with a hint of patronage because our relative positions had changed since those days. ‘Come in, old man. I’m glad to see you. I expected you the other night. Forgive the confusion. Try that chair – you’ll find it pretty snug.’ The chair was certainly warm: it still held the heat of the last angry occupant. Three packs of cards were scattered over the table: the air was blue with cigar-smoke, and an ash-tray had toppled over, leaving some butts on the floor.

  ‘Who’s your friend?’ I asked.

  ‘Someone in the Treasury Department. A bad loser.’

  ‘Gin-rummy?’

  ‘He shouldn’t have raised the stakes half-way through, when he was well ahead. But you don’t argue with someone in the Treasury, do you? In any case at the end the old ace of spades turned up and it was over in a flash. I’m two thousand to the good. But he paid me in gourdes, not dollars. What’s your poison?’

  ‘Have you a whisky?’

  ‘I have next to everything, old man. You wouldn’t fancy a dry Martini?’

  I would have preferred a whisky, but he seemed anxious to show off the riches of his store, so, ‘If it’s very dry,’ I said.

  ‘Ten to one, old man.’

  He unlocked the cupboard and drew out a leather travelling-case – a half-bottle of gin, a half-bottle of vermouth, four metal beakers, a shaker. It was an elega
nt expensive set, and he laid it reverently on the tumbled table as though he were an auctioneer showing a prized antique. I couldn’t help commenting on it. ‘Asprey’s?’ I asked.

  ‘As good as,’ he replied quickly and began to mix the cocktails.

  ‘It must feel a little odd finding itself here,’ I said, ‘so far from W.I.’

  ‘It’s used to much stranger places,’ he said. ‘I had it with me in Burma during the war.’

  ‘It’s come out remarkably unscathed.’

  ‘I had it furbished up again.’

  He turned away from me to find a lime, and I took a closer look at the case. Asprey’s trade mark was visible inside the lid. He came back with the lime and saw me looking.

  ‘I’m caught, old man. It is from Asprey’s. I didn’t want to seem pretentious, that’s all. As a matter of fact there’s quite a history around that case.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Try the drink first and see if it’s to your taste.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘I got that case as a result of a bet with some other chaps in the outfit. The brigadier had one like it, and I couldn’t help envying him. I used to dream of a case like that on patrol – the shaker clinking with the ice. I had two young chaps out with me from London – never been much further than Bond Street before. Well-lined, both of them. They teased me about the brigadier’s cocktail-set. Once when we got pretty near to the end of our water they challenged me to find a stream before night. If I did I could have a cocktail-case like that next time anyone went home. I don’t know whether I’ve told you that I can smell water . . .’

  ‘Was that the time you lost the whole platoon?’ I asked. He looked up at me over his glass and I’m sure he read my thoughts. ‘That was another occasion,’ he said and changed the subject abruptly.

  ‘How are Smith and Mrs Smith?’

  ‘You saw what happened by the Post Office.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was the last instalment of American aid. They left this evening on the plane. They sent their regards to you.’

  ‘I wish I’d seen more of them,’ Jones said. ‘There’s something about him . . .’ He added surprisingly, ‘He reminded me of my father. Not physically, I mean, but . . . well, a sort of goodness.’