The Comedians (7 page)

‘You expelled their military mission. You had the ambassador recalled. You can't expect much confidence there, can you? My God, I completely forgot. There's a presidential candidate on board the boat.'

‘A presidential candidate? I should have been warned.'

‘Not a very successful one.'

‘All the same. A presidential candidate. What does he come here for?'

‘He has an introduction to the Secretary for Social Welfare.'

‘Doctor Philipot? But Doctor Philipot . . .'

‘Anything wrong?'

‘You know what politics are. It's the same in all countries.'

‘Doctor Philipot is out?'

‘He has not been seen for a week. He is said to be on holiday.' Petit Pierre touched the taxi-driver's shoulder. ‘Stop,
mon ami
.' We hadn't got as far yet as the Columbus statue, and the dark was rapidly falling. He said, ‘Mr Brown, I think that I had better go back and find him. You know how it is in your own country – one must avoid giving a false impression. It would not do for me to come to England carrying an introduction to Mr Macmillan.' He waved to me as he went away. ‘I will come up presently for a whisky. I am so glad, so glad, to see you back, Mr Brown,' and he departed with that air of euphoria, based on nothing at all.

We drove on. I asked the driver – he was probably a Tonton agent, ‘Shall we get to the Trianon before the lights go out?' He shrugged his shoulders. It was not his job to give away information. The lights were still burning in the exhibition building used by the Secretary of State, and there was a Peugeot parked by the Columbus statue. Of course there were a lot of Peugeots in Port-au-Prince, and I couldn't believe that she would be cruel enough or tasteless enough to choose the same rendezvous. All the same I said to the driver, ‘I'll get out here. Take my luggage up to the Trianon. Joseph will pay you.' I could hardly have been less prudent. The colonel in charge of the Tontons Macoute would certainly know next morning exactly where I had left the taxi. The only precaution I took was to see that the man really drove away. I watched the tail-lights until they were out of sight. Then I made my way towards Columbus and the parked car. I came up behind it and saw the
C
.
D
. number plate. It was Martha's car and she was alone.

I watched her for a little while without being seen. It occurred to me that I could wait there, a few yards away, until I saw the man who came to meet her. Then she turned her head and stared in my direction; she knew that someone was watching her. She lowered the window half an inch and said sharply in French, as though I might be one of the innumerable beggars of the port, ‘Who are you? What do you want?' Then she turned on her headlights. ‘Oh God,' she said, ‘so you've come back,' in the kind of tone she might have used for a recurrent fever.

She opened the door and I got in beside her. I could feel uncertainty and fear in her kiss. ‘Why have you come back?' she asked.

‘I suppose I missed you.'

‘Did you have to run away to discover that?'

‘I hoped that things might change if I went away.'

‘Nothing has changed.'

‘What are you doing here?'

‘It's a better place than most to miss you in.'

‘You weren't waiting for anyone?'

‘No.' She took one of my fingers and twisted it till it hurt. ‘I can be
sage
, you know, for a few months. Except in dreams. I've been unfaithful in dreams.'

‘I've been faithful too – in my way.'

‘You needn't tell me now,' she said, ‘what your way is. Just be quiet. Be here.'

I obeyed her. I was half-happy, half-miserable, because it was only too evident one thing hadn't changed, except that now without my car she would have to drive me back and run the risk of being seen near the Trianon: we wouldn't say good night beside Columbus. Even while I made love to her I tested her. Surely she wouldn't have the nerve to take me if she were expecting another man at the rendezvous, and then I told myself that it wasn't a fair test – she had nerve for anything. It was no lack of nerve that tied her to her husband. She gave a cry which I remembered and stuck her hand over her mouth. Her body lost its tenseness, she was like a tired child resting on my knees. She said, ‘I forgot to close the window.'

‘We'd better get up to the Trianon before the lights go out.'

‘Have you found someone to buy the place?'

‘No.'

‘I'm glad.'

In the public park the musical fountain stood black, waterless, unplaying. Electric globes winked out the nocturnal message, ‘
Je suis le drapeau Haïtien, Uni et Indivisible. François Duvalier
.'

We passed the blackened beams of the house the Tontons had destroyed and mounted the hill towards Pétionville. Half-way up there was a road-block. A man in a torn shirt and a grey pair of trousers and an old soft hat which someone must have discarded in a dustbin came trailing his rifle by its muzzle to the door. He told us to get out and be searched. ‘I'll get out,' I said, ‘but this lady belongs to the diplomatic corps.'

‘Darling, don't make a fuss,' she said. ‘There are no such things as privileges now.' She led the way to the roadside, putting her hands above her head and giving the militiaman a smile I hated.

I said to him, ‘Don't you see the
C
.
D
. on the car?'

‘And can't you see,' she said, ‘that he can't read?' He felt my hips and ran his hands up between my legs. Then he opened the boot of the car. It was not a very practised search and it was soon over. He cleared a passage through the barrier and let us go by. ‘I don't like you driving back alone,' I said. ‘I'll lend you a boy – if I've got one left,' and then after I had driven half a mile further I went back in my mind to the old suspicion. If a husband is notoriously blind to infidelity, I suppose a lover has the opposite fault – he sees it everywhere. ‘Tell me what you were really doing, waiting by the statue?'

‘Don't be a fool tonight,' she said. ‘I'm happy.'

‘I never wrote to you that I was coming back.'

‘It was a place to remember you in, that was all.'

‘It seems a coincidence that just tonight . . .'

‘Do you suppose this was the only night I bothered to remember you?' She added, ‘Luis asked me once why I had stopped going out in the evening for gin-rummy now the curfew had lifted. So next night I took the car as usual. I had no one to see and nothing to do, so I drove to the statue.'

‘And Luis is content?'

‘He's always content.'

Suddenly, around us, above us and below us, the lights went out. Only a glow remained around the harbour and the government buildings.

‘I hope Joseph has kept a bit of oil for my return,' I said. ‘I hope he's wise as well as virgin.'

‘Is he virgin?'

‘Well, he's chaste. Since the Tontons Macoute kicked him around.'

We entered the steep drive lined with palm trees and bougainvillaea. I always wondered why the original owner had called the hotel the Trianon. No name could have been less suitable. The architecture of the hotel was neither classical in the eighteenth-century manner nor luxurious in the twentieth-century fashion. With its towers and balconies and wooden fretwork decorations it had the air at night of a Charles Addams house in a number of the
New Yorker
. You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him. But in the sunlight, or when the lights went on among the palms, it seemed fragile and period and pretty and absurd, an illustration from a book of fairy-tales. I had grown to love the place, and I was glad in a way that I had found no purchaser. I believed that if I could own it for a few more years I would feel I had a home. Time was needed for a home as time was needed to turn a mistress into a wife. Even the violent death of my partner had not seriously disturbed my possessive love. I would have remarked with Frère Laurent, in the French version of
Romeo and Juliet
, a sentence that I had reason to remember:

The remedy had been in the success which owed nothing to my partner: in the voices calling from the bathing-pool, in the rattle of ice from the bar where Joseph made his famous rum punches, in the arrival of taxis from the town, in the hubbub of lunch on the verandah, and at night the drummer and the dancers, with Baron Samedi, a grotesque figure in a ballet, stepping it delicately in his top-hat under the lighted palms. I had known for a short time all of this.

We drew up in the darkness, and I kissed Martha again: it was still an interrogation. I could not believe in a fidelity that lasted for three months of solitude. Perhaps – it was a less disagreeable speculation than another – she had turned to her husband again. I held her against me and said, ‘How is Luis?'

‘The same,' she said, ‘always the same.' And yet I thought she must have loved him once. This is one of the pains of illicit love: even your mistress's most extreme embrace is a proof the more that love doesn't last. I had met Luis for the second time when I was among the thirty guests at an embassy cocktail party. It seemed to me impossible that the ambassador – that stout man in the late forties whose hair gleamed like a polished shoe – did not remark how often our eyes met across the crowded room, the surreptitious touch she gave me with her hand as we passed. But Luis kept his appearance of established superiority: this was his embassy, this was his wife, these were his guests. The books of matches were stamped with his initials, even the bands round his cigars. I remember him raising a cocktail glass to the light and showing me the delicate engraving of a bull's mask. He said, ‘I had them specially designed for me in Paris.' He had a great sense of possession, but perhaps he didn't mind lending what he possessed.

‘Has Luis comforted you while I was away?'

‘No,' she said, and I cursed myself for my cowardice in so phrasing the question that her answer remained ambiguous. She added, ‘No one has comforted me,' and at once I began to think of all the meanings of comfort from which she might choose one to satisfy her sense of truth. For she had a sense of truth.

‘You've got a different scent.'

‘Luis gave me this for my birthday. I'd finished yours.'

‘Your birthday. I forgot . . .'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘Joseph is a long time,' I said. ‘He must have heard the car.'

She said, ‘Luis is kind to me. You are the only one who kicks me around. Like the Tontons Macoute with Joseph.'

‘What do you mean?'

Everything was just as before. After ten minutes we had made love, and after half an hour we had begun to quarrel. I left the car and walked up the steps in the dark. At the top I nearly stumbled on my suitcases which the driver must have deposited there, and I called, ‘Joseph, Joseph' and no one replied. The verandah stretched on either side of me, but no table was laid for dinner. Through the open door of the hotel I could see the bar by the light of a tiny oil-lamp, like the ones you place beside a child's bed or the bed of someone sick. This was my luxury hotel – a circle of light which barely touched a half-empty bottle of rum, two stools, a syphon of soda crouched in the shadow like a bird with a long beak. I called again, ‘Joseph, Joseph,' and again nobody answered. I went back down the steps to the car and said to Martha, ‘Stay a moment.'

‘Is something wrong?'

‘I can't find Joseph.'

‘I ought to be getting back.'

‘You can't go alone. Don't be in such a hurry. Luis can wait a moment.'

I mounted the steps again to the Hotel Trianon. ‘A centre of Haitian intellectual life. A luxury-hotel which caters equally for the connoisseur of good food and the lover of local customs. Try the special drinks made from the finest Haitian rum, bathe in the luxurious swimming-pool, listen to the music of the Haitian drum and watch the Haitian dancers. Mingle with the
élite
of Haitian intellectual life, the musicians, the poets, the painters who find at the Hotel Trianon a social centre . . .' The tourist brochure had been nearly true once.

I felt under the bar and found an electric torch. I went through the lounge to my office, the desk covered with old bills and receipts. I had not expected a client, but even Joseph was not there. What a homecoming, I thought, what a homecoming. Below the office was the bathing-pool. About this hour the cocktail guests should have been arriving from other hotels in the town. Few in the good days drank anywhere else but the Trianon, except for those who were booked on round tours and chalked everything up. The Americans always drank dry Martinis. By midnight some of them would be swimming in the pool naked. Once I had looked out of my window at two in the morning. There was a great yellow moon and a girl was making love in the pool. She had her breasts pressed against the side and I couldn't see the man behind her. She didn't notice me watching her; she didn't notice anything. That night I thought before I slept, ‘I have arrived.'

I heard steps in the garden coming up from the direction of the swimming-pool, the broken steps of a man limping. Joseph had always limped since his encounter with the Tontons Macoute. I was about to go out on to the verandah to meet him when I looked again at my desk. There was something missing. All the bills were there which had accumulated in my absence, but where was the small brass paper-weight shaped like a coffin, marked with the letters
R
.
I
.
P
., that I bought for myself one Christmas in Miami? It had no value, it had cost me two dollars seventy-five cents, but it was mine and it amused me and it was no longer there. Why should things change in our absence? Even Martha had changed her scent. The more unstable life is the less one likes the small details to alter.