The Comedians (13 page)

‘Now you are here, we had better drive away. Our colleagues begin to arrive after eleven when the official dinners are over.'

She backed the car out. ‘Where are we going?' I asked.

‘I don't know.'

‘What made you speak to me last night?'

‘I don't know.'

‘You followed my luck?'

‘Yes. I suppose I was curious to see what your mother's son was like. Nothing new ever happens here.'

Ahead of us the port lay in a wash of temporary floodlights. Two cargo-ships were being unloaded. There was a long procession of bowed figures under sacks. She swung the car round in a half-circle and brought it into a deep patch of shadow close to the white statue of Columbus. ‘None of our kind come here at night,' she said, ‘and so no beggars come either.'

‘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 knees 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.'