A short story by Haitian author Fernand Hibbert from the collection Masques et Visages (1910)
English Translation by Matt Robertshaw
1.
“So, he danced with you for a long time at the ball?”
“Yes, mother.”
“And what did he say to you?”
“Oh! Hardly anything. He kept repeating the same phrase and he always laughed.”
“It must have been gay! In any case, you should have invited him to come see us.”
“I didn’t think that would be very appropriate; but my brother did it anyway.”
“So, Arthur invited him. You should have told me that in the first place.”
“Yes mother. And for this afternoon at four o’clock.”
“Ah! If this marriage could only come to pass.”
And Mrs. Austis started thinking… Obviously this was not the husband she would have wanted for Aline, so fine, so pretty, so graceful and slender like a dream princess. But what of it? They are the only ones with an appropriate and stable situation. One must adapt.
“And how is he, this Mr. Tcherniüsst? —My god, you have to sneeze to say that name!”
“But, mama! He’s pretty well the same as the others, except, he’s very red and his hair is… ‘carrot.’”
“Poor dear!” She kissed her daughter. “Is this gentleman Hessian? Württemberger? Bavarian?...”
“He’s Pomeranian.”
“That’s far, Pomerania, in the north of Prussia, bugger! Still, he is a German—plus, he’s rich—he has accounts, my dear.”
Indeed, Mr. Otto Seddlitz Tcherniüsst, who had arrived broke in Port-au-Prince four years earlier, was now rich and abounding with good accounts paying fantastic interest—which we paid and we pay to know. Was it to hard work, to an unequalled ability, or perhaps to his business sense that Mr. Tcherniüsst owed his stupefying fortune, which won the admiration of the local simpletons? A few light brushstrokes will get you up to speed with his curriculum vitae.
Until the age of thirty, Otto lived a mostly regrettable life in his country; he was successively a stableman in Stettin, a busboy in Berlin and a boot polisher in Hamburg; he rambled through this liberal profession until he received a check for a thousand marks from his friend Ottfried Pffisst, who summoned him to Haiti, “a country where one doesn’t need to work to enrich oneself,” and the thousand marks, Pffisst specified, “were to pay his passage and buy him a suit, linens and some indispensible toiletries.” To finish his letter Ottfried verged on a sort of lyricism: “The country is rich! Rich! You have no idea how rich! And especially how the Haitians are stupid!” he added with a just admiration for us. At the same time, he sent his friend a letter of recommendation for a branch of the Bank of Hamburg. And when Mr. Otto Seddlitz Tcherniüsst embarked on the cargo boat that would bring him to Port-au-Prince, he had in his pocket an authorization, by law, to make withdrawals from the said Bank, to the limit of thirty thousand dollars…
He had tread the earth of our fatherland five days when the Haitian State threw him what we like to call—euphemistically no doubt—a loan, which was covered with no delay. Otto hastened to produce his thirty thousand dollars, which he immediately cashed in for paper at 180%, giving him eighty four thousand gourdes, which he lent to the State, which took the opportunity, with the mediation of the National Bank, of reimbursing him with eighty four thousand dollars with interest and a half percent per month on this value. And the State, still by way of the National Bank, assumed the duties in gold of the said repayment, principal and interests.
Otto opened his big green eyes, stroked his fat swarthy paws through his red hair and said to himself: “What a stupid bunch!!! It’s incredible!!!”
Within a few months Otto paid back the thirty thousand dollars to the Bank of Hamburg with interest and commissions owed, and still maintained a fortune of more than fifty thousand dollars, which brought him an additional thousand dollars each month.
All he had to do was carry on, and on he carried. So he didn’t owe it to his own work, nor to good sense, nor even to the slightest cerebral effort. There was indeed someone who worked in all of this: the Haitian people, and it was the duties in gold taken from the coffee they cultivated that served to fatten not just Pffisst, Tcherniüst and the like—but also the whole cloud of indignant parasites who go on following them patriotically.
It is easy to understand that, having become such an important person, there was not enough of Otto to go around for all the ‘demanderesses,’ as we say. He was invited right and left. It was a coffee here, a lunch there; breakfast in Pétionville, dinner in Turgeau, horse riding in Bizoton, an excursion in the plain. Otto always accepted, stunned to find himself so congenial, so cherished, so fashionable. The Haitian women seemed sociable, infinitely likeable, and sought to make a poor stranger forget that he was more than two thousand leagues from his fatherland. To prove to them his gratitude he would drink and eat whatever they wanted. It was hell to try and get him to reveal his ‘intentions.’ He stubbornly refused to explain himself. He always said ‘yes,’ laughed when appropriate—and the conversation generally ended there. He understood nothing and confused everything, objects and people. It never crossed his mind that all the charges they were making in his honor were intended to prepare him for a local marriage. He believed that the nation’s manners were such that strangers, particularly Teutons, enjoyed certain privileges. Also he frequented and witnessed the most repulsive intrigues, a smile on his lips. People stared at him, telling the most horrible things about one another, without him being the least bit affected. He said simply: “What a funny country. The locals love foreigners and hate each other.”
Otto continued with this easy and peaceful existence right up until the day he noticed Miss Aline Austis. As could be expected, he didn’t know what he was feeling.
He felt a need to clean his nails and arrange his clothes a bit more nicely. He also tried to expand his brain and believed he had found a truly subtle way to go about it: he gave up beer and drank rum to his heart’s content. His brain remained no less opaque.
In the end, in order to strike while the iron was hot, he ended up finding a few expressions that he thought were very tender; every time he was in Miss Austis’ presence he said: “
Me would like to look at me
always in your eyes,” after which he laughed for a long time, revealing his rotten teeth…
At the ball, he sat next to her the whole time, his large swarthy hands placed on his arched knees, his big green eyes staring stupidly ahead of him, turning his fat shaggy head toward Aline from time to time and saying with a smug smile: “me would like to look at me always in your eyes.”
And the poor girl smiled kindly, as if she was happy with what this ruddy man believed was first-rate gallantry. It was at this ball that Mr. Otto Seddlitz Tcherniüsst accepted the formal invitation, made by Arthur Austis, to go partake in a coffee the following afternoon, Sunday at four o’clock precisely, at Mrs. Austis’ house.
A special chapter is necessary to recount what happened that Sunday… 19 July… at Mrs. Austis’ house. A day of suspense, emotion, hopes… They spoke only of Otto: “He’ll sit here.” “We won’t let him leave until eight p.m. and we’ll invite him to come back the next day.” “And every day after that.” “How the other ladies will ‘scathe.’” “Ah! There there.” “Aline, you’ll play the scherzo from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and then you’ll sing the great air from Schubert’s Freïschulz, and Arthur will accompany on his violin. He’ll be tickled, this German, his patriotism will be stirred, besides it’s a delicate detail to only let him hear German music.” “Ah! Mother, it’s clear that you don’t know him, he believes all beautiful music is German.” “Quiet then, what beast isn’t made tender by music? Go and practice.”
By two in the afternoon the house was as quiet as a grave: “My dear, his enthusiasm to see you might have him here early.” Each buss that passed by outside cut everyone’s breath. “It’s him! No it’s not him.” Three o’clock chimed, then four o’clock. Five minutes before four everyone had taken their places, their theatrical attitudes. Arthur seemed vacant; Aline looked indifferent, Mrs. Austis was busy knitting: “He’s a white man, my dear, he’ll be here at four on the dot.” Four thirty! Nothing. Five thirty! Six! No one. Seven! No one, and not the smallest word of an excuse.
Mrs. Austis was pale, Arthur, his bow in hand, was no less. As for Aline, she felt defeated. She could be heard repeating: “Ah! Mr. Tcherniüsst! Ah! Mr. Tcherniüsst! Ah! Mr. Tcherniüsst!” It was as if everyone in the house was feverish.
That Sunday, Tcherniüsst never came.
“Still,” said Mrs. Austis, starting to pull herself together, “still, the cards said this marriage would come to pass.”
“Yes,” said Aline, wiping her eyes, “but you’re forgetting that they also said it would be hard.”
“That’s right,” replied Mrs. Austis optimistically. “Well, we will fight! While we wait we pray, my dear, we pray…”
2.
Why didn’t Tcherniüsst show up? It was because, at the ball, a discrete ear had overheard Arthur Austis’ invitation. The latter had hardly turned his back when Mr. Tcherniüsst was approached by Mrs. von Hanchois who invited him to spend the next day in Pétionville. Tcherniüsst, it must be said, tried to decline, but Mrs. Hanchois, like the greedy River Acheron, never gave up her prey so easily: “Tomorrow morning,” she said to him, “my husband and I will pass by in our buss to pick you up.”
And as if to raise the value of what she had just said she added, in her matchless accent: “In our handsome two-horse drawn buss.” Tcherniüsst capitulated.
Here, for the clarity of this story, I find myself obligated to sketch, at least in profile, the portrait of Mrs. Hanchois.
Mrs. Hanchois was an ex-Haitian, over thirty, though, as she had claimed for a decade, “almost twenty-two.” She wasn’t pretty, no one thought much of her, right up until the day when, by one of those strange deliveries of destiny, she married a German, Mr. Werther von Hanchois. She had persuaded him that he had won her in a heated battle against an incalculable number of suitors, to the extent that Hanchois sees every distinguished Haitian or foreigner who had settled in Port-au-Prince before him as a defeated rival.
He has a way of looking at you with a little mocking smile on his lips, as if to say: “Hey! I won her!” Beyond that he’s perfectly happy; he and his wife adore one another. Since Mrs. Hanchois adores her Werner, why does she go to such lengths to prevent the marriage of others, one might ask?Here we have a curious enough psychological case which is worth noting. For Mrs. Hanchois, there are enough Haitian women married to Germans, and, since for her this constitutes a form of nobility, it is important that it stop expanding, the nobility being by definition a closed set. You can her say things like: “If everyone married a German it would be anarchy!”
Also, she had sworn to kill the love she sensed was beginning to grow in Otto’s heart. She was made all the more treacherous and stubborn by the fact that Aline was deliciously pretty.
When on Sunday morning at seven o’clock Mrs. Hanchois arrived at Pétionville with her husband and Tcherniüsst, she had already achieved her goal, and Otto didn’t have the mental resources to do anything about it.
During the whole trip she found ways to punctuate the conversation with features that were as mean as venomous about Aline. She was preparing the ground for the great battle that she was expecting to have after breakfast, when Otto was sufficiently stuffed.
And so, when the car rolled on the great entrance road to Pétionville, where one breathes such a sweet and fresh odor of the fat and fertile soil, a ferocious smile revealed her sharp canine teeth of sparkling whiteness, and her nostrils flared as if she was already victorious…
Alas! She didn’t know how successful she was going to be…
They stopped in front of an elegant little villa to which a pretty avenue of orange trees led, elegantly sand-paved after the English manner. When they had settled in, Mrs. Hanchois yelled: “Werther, I’ll leave you with Mr. Tcherniüsst until breakfast. My duties as Amphitryonesse oblige me to act thus,” she added with a graceful pout, turning to Otto, who had no idea what she was saying.
The two compatriots went under the veranda and sat themselves in wicker chairs; and there, they began drinking a string of gin cocktails and smoking endless pipes, looking at each other and not saying the slightest word.
This lasted at least two hours, then Mrs. Hanchois told them to go wash up, “so they could eat with a better appetite.” They did so with the consciousness that Germans put into everything they do. After their baths they imbibed a few more gin cocktails. Finally they sat to the table!
They started with a sausage, which was welcomed enthusiastically. “It’s from Mayence, specially ordered for us, we’re the only ones eating this quality,” Mrs. Hanchois stated in a tone that admitted no reply. Otto ate two thirds of the sausage, which was not meager, you can be sure. At every moment this cry was heard: “Bread, Anatole, bread! What! There’s never bread in the basket!” This repeated like a Wagnerian leitmotif. Anatole filled the basket, he hardly did anything else, but it was emptied as soon as it was filled. After the sausage they energetically attacked a Frankfurt ham (also specially ordered) surrounded by sauerkraut and mixed with sauces and cervelat straight from Nuremberg. “Anatole! Bread! Where’s the bread?” And that was paired with a particular beer from Pilsen, and that’s all I’ll say about that!
All at once, Mrs. Hanchois, who ate little, came out of her admiration of the two heroes and shouted:
“And the foie gras? Anatole, my friend, serve the foie gras! A foie gras specially prepared for us by the Neffast house of Mulhouse! My God! How poorly we are served in this damn country!”
The foie gras, offering no resistance on its own, was taken with an assault of plenty of bread. And the glasses—the big glasses, if you please—were filled with that famous beer from Pilsen and were emptied, as if by magic.
“Anatole, serve the entrées! Since all we’ve seen so far has been the hors d’oeuvres.”
Otto and Hanchois, waiting for the entrées, were out of breath. Otto’s tongue was even loosened a bit. They spoke without saying anything, such as happens often around a table, even among intellectuals.
“Ha! Here’s the fish!” Hanchois shouted. “Bravo! It’s ‘grandiose!’”
“It’s a shark,” Otto added, believing himself witty.
Otto found that so funny that long after he repeated the word to himself: “shark”… “shark”; and each time laughed excessively…
The fish was hardly gobbled up when it was deemed necessary to follow it up with a lobster seasoned with a green sauce—and that was matched with a delicious little white wine, which, in the words of Mrs. Hanchois, “inspired spiritualism.” This must, no doubt, be understood to mean that this little wine made the spirited men who drank it even more twinkling.
And the entrées were ended off with a salmon, prepared specially in Coblentz for the use of the Hanchois couple—which didn’t prevent the cover of the package that contained the salmon from saying: Demeuran & Cie. The salmon was at its end when Anatole brandished a superb roast, oven-cooked to perfection. The roast, of a beautiful brown colour, rose up like a pyramid on a silver platter and was bathed in a blonde sauce with a smell that would drive a food lover mad.
In the face of this masterpiece, Hanchois felt weak, but Otto smiled, the smile of a strong man facing an impossible obstacle.
Do you recall Gabart, in front of the Tomb of the Indigenous Peoples, the dreaded fortification of the French on the frontier? “Take that fort for me, Gabart, my child!” Dessalines shouted. “The fort is yours!” Gabart replied, and he was at the head of the company of that charge through brambles and trenches—and the fort was taken and the enemy overturned.
With equal vigor, the Pomeranian attacked that mass of meat, which by its composure seemed to challenge him. If his ancestors had deployed as much energy at Jena, Napoleon would not have won the battle.
To accompany the roast, Mrs. Hanchois had the salad served: “a symphonic salad,” she said, no doubt because it had a bit of everything in it; hard-boiled eggs, potatoes and beets made up the solid foundation, and filets of cured herring enhanced the flavor—the herring was cured in Holland, as you would expect.
Where the thing took on a moving quality, was when the turkey was brought out; it weighed ten pounds and was arranged majestically on a great vermillion platter. It was a golden colour and smelled exquisite, its flanks were bursting with stuffing, mostly of glazed chestnuts, grilled for the occasion and mixed with sausage meat…
Otto looked at it fearlessly, but Hanchois went pale. However he made a supreme effort and they both attacked it; the battle was lively, epic, of an exciting interest, and consequently the turkey was reduced to a few vague giblets in no time. “Hurrah!” At this time the two friends began furiously singing German patriotic hymns and repeatedly banging their glasses with their knives.
They calmed only slightly in front of the cabbage, the smell of which had invaded the dining room, and which they sniffed with pure joy. “How great it smells!” Otto rejoiced.
The meal, coming to its final phase, surpassed itself in greatness. The dessert was served. A sole wine accompanied it, but what a wine! It was bright and heady wine from the Rheingau. They opened fire on the cheese, which was a Camembert that flowed like pus. “Bread, Anatole, bread!” “We’re celebrating the Camembert.” “It’s spot on,” shouted Hanchois, “what a masterpiece!” When the masterpiece was no more than a souvenir, they approached the fruit. Otto, after inhaling a full dozen bananas like they were nothing, delighted in an apricot, which was so rotund that it demanded respect. As for Hanchois, he “worked on” a fragrant pineapple sweetbread. “To rinse out my mouth,” he repeated every time he finished a slice, “to rinse out my mouth.”
“Bring the cake!” Mrs. Hanchois barked.
While waiting, the two heroes, as not to be inactive, nibbled on almonds, walnuts and hazelnuts. And the Rheingau made it wonderful!...
Meanwhile, Mrs. Hanchois began cutting the cake. “A love without end!” she explained, smirking at Otto, while Anatole popped open the champagne. All this was in the midst of deafening shouting and singing. Finally they left the table and each went in a different direction in order to have “a small and necessary promenade for digestion,” Mrs. Hanchois declared, but in reality it was to expel the “excess of liquids,” to use the suggestive expression of Sganarelle. After the nice little “bromenade,” they assembled in the front garden and took a seat in some comfortable roking-chairs, drank an exquisite coffee “a pure mocha of the latest variety,” which they hastened to follow with an incalculable series of glasses of brandy, which made them clack their tongues. After that the box of cigars, also of “the latest variety,” was passed around. “My husband paid twenty dollars a box, sir!” Then there was a gloomy silence. Hanchois, first, felt the need to be quiet, and as he was staggering through the avenue, walking on his hands, his feet in the air, producing terrifying cries of joy, Mrs. Hanchois emitted a stream of insults against Aline into Otto’s ear; she thought of the blackest things she could conjure up about the poor girl and her mother. Did Otto understand? Who will ever know! Except, he didn’t feel well. “Madame Hanchois,” he said with a dreadful grimace, “Madame Hanchois, I feel me sick very.” Five o’clock chimed, and meanwhile, at Mrs. Austis’ house, they had been expecting him for an hour, you know how emotionally tormented they were!... The Hanchois ordered the “hitch up” for their guest, as he was indisposed.
When Otto arrived at his home, in Turgeau, he went to bed. It was five o’clock. What happened that night? No one knows… What’s certain is that the next morning Otto was found stiff and frozen in his bed, almost lifeless, his stomach swollen…
In no time the house was invaded by neighbours and a call was made to the pomaded Doctor Lapouyte, of the Faculty of Paris, who as a surgeon left an imperishable souvenir in a little town of our little republic. The young doctor, with his triumphant moustache, soon arrived, elegantly strapped into a pearl-grey frock coat. He quickly examined the Pomeranian, then said casually, “I see what it is, he has a body parasite, in his abdomen, it will have to be removed,” and with his scalpel, he boldly opened the abdomen of unfortunate Otto. The poor boys big green eyes almost shot out of their sockets and dropped to the floor most horribly: Otto surrendered his simplistic soul to the great trickster who created us for his entertainment. And an old negress, the servant of the deceased, approached him and gently closed his eyelids; then, turning to Doctor Lapouyte who was still enthusiastically butchering the cadaver, she said with a tone of deaf rage: “Enough, m’chè, enough!” Lapouyte wanted to lecture, and started talking about the need to “research the causes”… The need to find the “parasite” so that he could conclude and make advancements to “experimental science.” Lapouyte had to lower his voice, faced with the purely hostile attitude of those present; the epithet “executioner” was instantly applied to him. This didn’t prevent him, a few days later, from charging the respectable sum of twelve hundred gourdes for that fine operation.
“I believe our friend Lapouyte has found the parasite!” wrote Pascal Larcher on learning this news…
The death of Otto was a lightning bolt, it was as if every mother had lost a son-in-law. The tears, the lamentations, the regrets were unending…
3.
A few days later, I was over at a friend’s place, Masséna Carpot, whose sisters receive many gusest. Fate—which is none other than God himself, as Anatole France said—wanted Mrs. Hanchois and Miss Aline Austis to be there also, on a visit, wrapped up in horrid boas and airing themselves furiously. The conversation quickly fell on Otto and his unexpected death.
“It was that Lapouyte who assassinated him!” Masséna exclaimed.
“Oh! How cruel!” said Mrs. Hanchois with her usual pout. “You forget that Lapouyte worked in Paris with Pinard, and that he practiced here at the new Morgue…”
“Personally,” said Miss Austis, “I think Mr. Tcherniüsst succumbed to congestion. Consider how fat he was and how his face was all red!...”
“Personally,” asserted Mrs. Hanchois, “I’m convinced that he was hit by a terrible attack of apoplexy; what do you think sir?” she added, turning toward me.
“Me,” said I, bowing, “I think, madam, that Mr. Otto Seddlitz Tcherniüsst died of indigestion…”
June 1903.
***See also my translation of Hibbert's novella Romulus on Amazon.
"Crac!"*
