The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe (25 page)

“You disappeared?”

“He came to our house twice.”

“Who?”

“We didn’t have a television and so I didn’t recognize him. Later, when I saw his program, it came as quite a surprise. I don’t know why he wanted to see Jean Claude—I have no idea of what they were planning. This was about two years ago, about the time there were still bombs going off. It was so obvious they were flattering Jean Claude and that they wanted something. They were running circles round him and Jean Claude just lapped it up—he loved to be told he was intelligent. It was Dugain. Nobody knew it—it was a secret—but I can assure you Dugain was in the independence movement and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was behind some of the bombs.”

“You recognized her?”

“My friend Agnès Loisel.”

Anne Marie looked at the photograph and she could feel bitterness swelling in her throat. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I never knew she was dead.”

“You didn’t know, Marie Pierre? You read the papers, you listen to the radio.”

“I didn’t know it was Agnès.” She pointed. “Not until I saw that photograph.”

Anne Marie turned the
France Antilles
over, hiding the grim face of death. “When did you last see Agnès?”

“When Dugain kicked us out in February.”

“You never saw her again after that?”

A grudging nod. “I chose not to talk to her.”

“I thought you were good friends. Isn’t that what you told me yesterday?”

“We were,” Marie Pierre said. “When I needed someone, she was good to me. Agnès was very good to me. She took me in and looked after me.”

“Your husband was also your friend—you just said so.”

Marie Pierre snorted angrily. “Jean Claude had become unbearable. In his opinion I was just a stupid woman—and all I wanted was to escape but there was nowhere to go.”

“Under the bedsheets is where reconciliation normally takes place between a man and his wife.”

“Agnès had a little place at Sainte-Anne. It was small but for me, it was like moving into a palace. We were happy together.”

“You no longer loved your husband?”

The face clouded. “By then there was another woman.”

“A lot of men have another woman. That’s something we learn to live with.”

Unexpectedly, like the sun breaking through clouds, a smile lit up Marie Pierre’s face. “If Jean Claude had other women, I really didn’t mind. It would give him something to do during the day and then he could sleep at night instead of pestering me. He didn’t love me—the garage had made him too bitter for that.”

“A man needs tenderness. By refusing him your body, you were refusing him your love.”

Marie Pierre looked at her hands, she looked at her red skirt, at the matching fingernails, she looked at the empty plastic cup on the table. “There was another woman.”

“So what?”

“A woman in my life.”

“Things’d reached the point where I could no longer stand the feel of his hands on me. Hands still dirty with car grease. Fingers that he wanted to put inside me.”

“A lot of women enjoy sex.”

“I’d have left him anyway.”

“If they didn’t enjoy sex, Marie Pierre, they wouldn’t put up with the pain of childbirth.”

“Agnès made me realize I owned my body.” She hesitated. “Agnès set me free and now she’s dead.”

“How did Agnès set you free?”

“A little girl, obeying orders and doing what I was told, desperately trying to please everybody and forgetting about myself. Agnès was right: I’d spent my life being a good little girl, letting people touch me, letting people use my body when I didn’t want it. That’s what Jean Claude couldn’t understand. He was like everybody else, like Maman, like the teachers at school. He couldn’t see I was a human being because as far as Jean Claude was concerned, I was there for his satisfaction—not a mind, not a living person but just a docile body with the right number of orifices. Just a body in the same way that I was a body for my mother. A little body to be kept clean, to look tidy—we were the only black people in our street in Paris, and it was all so terribly important what the neighbors thought.”

The pretty face frowned in thought. Finally Marie Pierre brushed
at her cheek and looked up at Anne Marie. “With Agnès, I knew it couldn’t last. I don’t really know if I like that sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Between two women—it’s not normal, is it?” Marie Pierre tried to smile. “When Agnès touched me—I know this sounds silly—it was magic. Agnès was an explorer—a discoverer who discovered what wasn’t even there—what had been lying hidden for twenty years. It was like …”

Outside from the streets came the sound of Pointe-à-Pitre on a Saturday morning—the sound of traffic, the sound of the Dominican women shouting their wares, the sound of the breeze in the royal palm trees of Place de la Victoire.

“Like being born again,” the girl said simply. A tear was running down her cheek.

“When she went off with her boyfriend, you murdered her, Marie Pierre?”

“How could I want to kill her? The person who’d helped me see what had happened to my soul?” She shook her head. “The boyfriends’d always been there. There’d always been men buzzing round her like dogs on heat, long before Olivier. I always knew I couldn’t give her all she needed.”

Anne Marie found herself smiling. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of.” She screwed the plastic cap back onto the mineral water.

She looked at Anne Marie. Traces of her tears had reached the deep red lipstick. “For six months we were happy.”

“Who murdered her?”

“It’s not natural, is it?”

“Love is natural but love makes big demands on us—and as often as not, we’re not up to them.”

“It was so nice—but it couldn’t last and in the end Agnès left me in the same way Papa had left me.”

“Why did she leave?”

Marie Pierre caught her breath. “She was going to Paris and it was me who told her to get pregnant. With Olivier, it wouldn’t be difficult, she’d just need to monitor her temperature. I told her we’d bring the child up together and that she didn’t need a man.”

“What did she say?”

“She laughed and she said her child must have a father.” Marie
Pierre added after a moment’s pause, “Perhaps if I’d had a father, a real father, I’d have waited, instead of marrying the first man who promised freedom from my mother. Perhaps I wouldn’t have married a man who was just another brick in the wall.” She looked at the hands on the red skirt. “Perhaps I could’ve given my husband what he needed.”

“You have a boyfriend now.”

She shook her head. “A business relationship.”

“Marriage is business—love and romance are the icing on the cake, Marie Pierre. Only it’s not a cake. Bringing children into this world and looking after them—it’s hard-nosed business.”

“There’s not much a woman can do by herself. You need a man just so that the others will leave you alone.” Marie Pierre fell silent.

“Agnès Loisel and you broke up because she wanted a child?”

“A woman needs a man—just as a whore needs a pimp.”

“Just as a flower needs sunshine.” Anne Marie leaned forward across the desk and touched the girl’s arm. “Did Agnès go off with her Olivier?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“How do you know I know?”

“Because you want me to help find the person who killed your friend.”

Marie Pierre looked at Anne Marie for a moment without speaking.

“Well?”

“She found a job in a hotel in Paris. I hadn’t seen her since the time Dugain gave us the sack. I was still angry. I hadn’t wanted to leave her house in Sainte-Anne but Agnès kicked me out and she said unkind things which hurt me a lot.”

“Such as?”

A shake of her head, as if trying to rid it of unpleasant memories. “I should’ve gone looking for her but instead I got involved in the leather goods and with Jaime—he’s from Colombia and he has a lot of contacts in South America.”

“You manage to sell that stuff?”

She looked up at Anne Marie. “We do the hotels and the beaches—the tourists are looking for souvenirs, and there’s virtually nothing
authentic from Guadeloupe. I don’t make much money but it pays the rent. I’m from Martinique, remember, and I don’t have any family here—apart from Jean Claude and he’s got another woman now. The job gives me a semblance of normality and at last I can get my ideas in order and take charge of my life.” She started to cry again. “The idea I could do something by myself, without relying on anybody, the idea I could survive without having to seek permission from other people—that’s what I owe to Agnès.”

“You never saw her again?”

“She went to France.”

“Who murdered her?”

Marie Pierre spoke softly. “She sent a postcard with the Eiffel Tower.”

Anne Marie ran a hand along her forehead. “Who killed Agnès Loisel and then left her body on the beach at the Pointe des Châteaux?”

“Agnès didn’t save my life,
madame le juge
. Agnès created it. Agnès was my true mother and the man who killed her is a very evil person.”

“So who killed her, Marie Pierre?”

The girl looked up at Anne Marie. Her dark eyes were wet. Even in her distress, she was beautiful, more beautiful than any sculpted goddess. She was beautiful, human and alive.

“Who killed her?”

“You must ask Olivier.”

A slight shrug of the smooth shoulders. “He’d been to the house to see Jean Claude but like most men, I don’t think he really looked at me. I was part of the furniture and he had come to talk politics with my husband.”

“I thought Dugain liked pretty girls.”

“They were all men there, talking politics, Jean Claude, Dugain and a couple of teachers from the university. They didn’t take any notice of me and my job was to serve, to bring them drinks and then stay out of the way.”

“When you were working for him, Dugain showed interest in you?”

“I showed no interest in him.”

“He touched you?”

“He wouldn’t have dared.”

Anne Marie sat back in her chair. She held the pen between her fingers and absent-mindedly played with the screw-cap. “How exactly did you get the job?”

“Through Desterres.”

“And how do you know Desterres?”

“What woman doesn’t know Desterres?”

“He tried to rape you?”

“He liked me.”

“In what way?”

“In what way do you think,
madame
? He found me pretty and perhaps he thought I was available.”

“Desterres’s married.”

“Married and divorced, with grown up children. Children of your color. Desterres’s wife is from Terre de Haut—with that light skin they have in the Saints.”

“Like Agnès’s skin?”

Marie Pierre nodded. “Agnès could have passed for a white woman.”

“Her father was white?”

“Agnès never knew her father. Her mother remarried when she was still a little girl.”

“You have the sort of skin that Desterres liked?”

“All mice are grey,
madame le juge
. You seem to think at night, when the lights are out, black men worry about color. You seem to think even in bed they prefer white women. But, if anything, when black men want to enjoy themselves and to work up a sweat, they prefer the negress’s rump.”

“If Desterres preferred black women, why did he marry a woman with light skin?”

“Black girls give pleasure but the light-skinned girl gives status.” Marie Pierre no longer frowned. “Why do you think my father left my mother? By going off with somebody else, he was going to find a better wife? He was looking for status, and as soon as he could, he dumped my mother—she has the same skin as me.” Marie Pierre pinched the flesh of her own arm. “We are descended from the Ashanti in Africa but what did my father care? He found his
chabine
, for all the good it did him.”

“If what you say is true …”

“Of course it’s true.”

“If black men don’t marry black women, how did you manage to marry so young?”

The lustrous lipstick widened with her smile. “I was in France,
madame le juge
, where black girls are the exception, not the rule. In Paris there are none of the complexes that go all the way back to the time of slavery and before. When I was in
collège
, I had a white boyfriend. Thierry—he was very sweet.”

“You should’ve married him.”

“And spend the rest of my life in the suburbs of Paris? Metro, job, bed.” Marie Pierre shook her head. “More to life than that—and I
didn’t want to end up like my mother, worrying what the neighbors’d think. Paranoid over a spot on my dress or a scratch in the varnish on the front door.”

“Instead you got married, returned to the Caribbean and discovered life was no better here.”

The carved goddess shook her head again. “Here in the West Indies—there are a lot of things wrong. The men are immature and spoiled mama’s boys but at least I belong.” She paused. “You,
madame le juge
, why don’t you return to Paris and to your people?”

“Why did Desterres use influence to get you the job?”

“I met him once when I was selling encyclopedias. Desterres was friendly and I knew perfectly well what he wanted. I wasn’t going to risk my marriage with a lecher like Desterres, an arrogant bastard who throws his money around to impress women. Desterres believes that every woman has her price.”

“Why did Desterres get you the job with Dugain?”

“To impress me.”

“He came to your house and he offered you a job?”

“That was later—that was when I had moved out and I was living in Sainte-Anne. He dropped by.”

“You were staying with Agnès?”

Marie Pierre nodded.

“He proposed a job to you both?”

“At first just to me. He wanted to get between my legs and he thought he had a better chance now that I no longer was living with my husband. Perhaps Dugain had told him he was looking for a couple of women to run the shop in Abymes.”

“Who told him where you were living?”

“No idea.” Marie Pierre paused. “I don’t know and I don’t care. He got me the job—and he got nothing in return.”