The Comedians

'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 йlite 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. I went out on to the verandah to meet Joseph. I could see his light as it corkscrewed along the curving path from the pool.

'Is it you, Monsieur Brown?' he called up nervously.

'Of course it's me. Why weren't you here when I arrived? Why have you left my suitcases … ?'

He stood below me looking up with a sick expression on his black face.

'Madame Pineda gave me a lift. I want you to drive back with her into the town. You can return on the bus. Is the gardener here?'

'He

go

away.'

'The

cook?'

'He

go

away.'

'My paper-weight? What's happened to my paper-weight?'

He looked at me as though he didn't understand.

'Have there been no guests at all since I left?'

'No, monsieur. Only …'

'Only

what?'

'Four nights ago Doctor Philipot he come here. He say tell nobody.'

'What did he want?'

'I tell him he no stay here. I tell him the Tontons Macoute look for him here.'

'What did he do?'

'He stay all the same. Then the cook go away and the gardener go away. They say they come back when he go. He very sick man. That's why he stay. I say go to the mountain, but he say no walk, no walk. His feet they swell bad. I tell him he go before you come back.'

'It's the hell of a mess for me to come back to,' I said. 'I'll talk to him. Which room is he in?'

'When I hear the car, I call to him - Tontons, get out quick. He very tired. He not want to go. He say "I be old man." I tell him Monsieur Brown he ruined if they find you here along. All same for you, I say, if Tontons find you in the road, but Monsieur Brown he ruined if they catch you here. I tell him I go and talk to them. He go out then quick quick. But it was only that stupid taxi-man with the luggage … So I run tell him.'

'What are we going to do with him, Joseph?' Doctor Philipot was not a bad man as government officials go. He had even during his first year of office made some attempt to improve the conditions of the shanty-town along the waterfront; they had built a water-pump, with his name on a stamped cast-iron label, at the bottom of the Rue Desaix, but the pipes had never been connected because the contractors had not received a proper rake-off.

'When I go in his room he not there any more.'

'Do you think he's made for the mountain?'

'No, Monsieur Brown, not the mountain,' Joseph said. He stood below me with his head bowed. 'I think he gone done a very wicked thing.' He added in a low voice the inscription on my paper-weight, 'Requiescat In Pace,' for Joseph was a good Catholic as well as a good Voodooist. 'Please, Monsieur Brown, come with me.'

I followed him down the path to the bathing-pool in which I had seen the pretty girl making love, once, in another epoch, in the golden age. It was empty of water now. My torch lit the shallows and a litter of leaves.