satisfactory.”
“You’re talking in riddles, Eric.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
“When I needed help, it was not forthcoming. Not from you, nor from the rest of my in-laws.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I’ve managed to get on famously without your help.”
“Stop being so stubborn, Anne Marie. You white women are all the same. I thought you were different—you’ve been in Guadeloupe now for ten years and you’ve done useful work. You’re stubborn, Anne Marie—too stubborn.”
“I get by.”
“You must be careful.”
“You want me off the Pointe des Châteaux affair—is that it? The Tourist Office wants me to keep the lid down?”
He laughed, but there was no humor in his eyes. What Anne Marie saw was male pity and chose not to hide her anger. “I mustn’t frighten off the Italian and the German tourists, Eric? They might head off to Hawaii and eat all that bland American food. That would throw discredit on your Tourist office.”
She dropped her napkin onto the table and pushed her chair back, ready to leave.
He caught her wrist. “As a relative, I want to help you.”
“Eric, we’re no longer relatives.”
“Several people—people who don’t know you and I are in any way related—several people are more than unhappy about what you’re up to.”
She stood up. She had started trembling.
“People who can make life miserable for you.”
She laughed incredulously. “It’s not miserable enough?”
“Forget Dugain, Anne Marie.”
“Dugain?”
“You can’t do any good. Not now. The man’s dead and gone.”
16
No Man’s Land
Carême
, the Lenten drought, was now over and it had started to rain.
The rain cooled the air, but Anne Marie felt hot and sticky, with her blouse clinging to her back. She crossed the road, her eyes on the sudden torrents of swirling water that ran across the asphalt and fed the rising puddles. An Opel hooted at her, and she had to step back fast. Its spray flecked her skirt and drenched her shoes—red shoes bought in Caracas.
She walked across the no-man’s land between the road and the new multi-story car park. The white earth was wet but hard underfoot. Rain battered onto her umbrella as Anne Marie hurried toward the courier office.
The octopus lay heavy on her stomach.
Twenty years earlier, when Anne Marie, young and newly married, had visited Pointe-à-Pitre for the first time, this part of the city had been a ghetto of wooden shacks lined haphazardly alongside the ditches where mosquitoes and glow-moths danced to the rhythms of tropical poverty, and where late at night the trucks collected buckets of malodorous night soil. In time, the mayor had had everything pulled down, replaced by the new town hall, the post office and the social security buildings, concrete tokens of France’s determination to modernize the long forgotten colonial backwater.
(“
After a century of doing it wrong in Algeria and Indochina
,” Jean Michel said.)
Two young boys cycled past her. They wore baseball caps, shouted gaily to each other and were impervious to the rain that drenched their clothes. Each boy carefully balanced his machine on the rear wheel, while the front wheel was held in suspension in the damp air. The tires left tracks that were immediately washed away by the incessant rain.
They grinned, their smiles lit up by perfect white teeth. The rain ran down the glowing skin of their young faces.
For some reason this stretch of land, glistening now in the grey light of the afternoon clouds, had been left, overlooked by the politicians and the developers. Surrounded as it was by high rises, office blocks, the ugly parking lot and the walls daubed with impenetrable curlicues of graffiti, Anne Marie could have been in the suburbs of Paris or Lille.
The sweat trickling down her back and the monotonous croak of the frogs reminded her she was in the tropics.
“Continental Couriers Inc.
Expédition vers les Etats Unis, la Métropole et
“You’re talking in riddles, Eric.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
“When I needed help, it was not forthcoming. Not from you, nor from the rest of my in-laws.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I’ve managed to get on famously without your help.”
“Stop being so stubborn, Anne Marie. You white women are all the same. I thought you were different—you’ve been in Guadeloupe now for ten years and you’ve done useful work. You’re stubborn, Anne Marie—too stubborn.”
“I get by.”
“You must be careful.”
“You want me off the Pointe des Châteaux affair—is that it? The Tourist Office wants me to keep the lid down?”
He laughed, but there was no humor in his eyes. What Anne Marie saw was male pity and chose not to hide her anger. “I mustn’t frighten off the Italian and the German tourists, Eric? They might head off to Hawaii and eat all that bland American food. That would throw discredit on your Tourist office.”
She dropped her napkin onto the table and pushed her chair back, ready to leave.
He caught her wrist. “As a relative, I want to help you.”
“Eric, we’re no longer relatives.”
“Several people—people who don’t know you and I are in any way related—several people are more than unhappy about what you’re up to.”
She stood up. She had started trembling.
“People who can make life miserable for you.”
She laughed incredulously. “It’s not miserable enough?”
“Forget Dugain, Anne Marie.”
“Dugain?”
“You can’t do any good. Not now. The man’s dead and gone.”
16
No Man’s Land
Carême
, the Lenten drought, was now over and it had started to rain.
The rain cooled the air, but Anne Marie felt hot and sticky, with her blouse clinging to her back. She crossed the road, her eyes on the sudden torrents of swirling water that ran across the asphalt and fed the rising puddles. An Opel hooted at her, and she had to step back fast. Its spray flecked her skirt and drenched her shoes—red shoes bought in Caracas.
She walked across the no-man’s land between the road and the new multi-story car park. The white earth was wet but hard underfoot. Rain battered onto her umbrella as Anne Marie hurried toward the courier office.
The octopus lay heavy on her stomach.
Twenty years earlier, when Anne Marie, young and newly married, had visited Pointe-à-Pitre for the first time, this part of the city had been a ghetto of wooden shacks lined haphazardly alongside the ditches where mosquitoes and glow-moths danced to the rhythms of tropical poverty, and where late at night the trucks collected buckets of malodorous night soil. In time, the mayor had had everything pulled down, replaced by the new town hall, the post office and the social security buildings, concrete tokens of France’s determination to modernize the long forgotten colonial backwater.
(“
After a century of doing it wrong in Algeria and Indochina
,” Jean Michel said.)
Two young boys cycled past her. They wore baseball caps, shouted gaily to each other and were impervious to the rain that drenched their clothes. Each boy carefully balanced his machine on the rear wheel, while the front wheel was held in suspension in the damp air. The tires left tracks that were immediately washed away by the incessant rain.
They grinned, their smiles lit up by perfect white teeth. The rain ran down the glowing skin of their young faces.
For some reason this stretch of land, glistening now in the grey light of the afternoon clouds, had been left, overlooked by the politicians and the developers. Surrounded as it was by high rises, office blocks, the ugly parking lot and the walls daubed with impenetrable curlicues of graffiti, Anne Marie could have been in the suburbs of Paris or Lille.
The sweat trickling down her back and the monotonous croak of the frogs reminded her she was in the tropics.
“Continental Couriers Inc.
Expédition vers les Etats Unis, la Métropole et
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