THREE LETTERS YOU WILL NEVER READ

BY GEORGES ANGLADE

Quina

(Originally published in 2006)

Translated by Anne Pease McConnell

In the collective memory of Quina there had only been two judicial executions in all the history of the town court. And since both of them took place during the same month of August in 1956, they became as unforgettable as a cyclone. I am not, of course, referring to the frequent extra-judicial executions, dating back to the mists of time, in the abject jails of the provincial police. No! I mean a sentence of death on paper, in due form, pronounced by a judge on the recommendation of a jury. Such extreme sentences were not rare in Quina, but from appeals to commutations of sentences, everyone knew that these games among the local members of the bar guaranteed that no one would ever have to face a legal firing squad. To get to that point, not only did bad luck have to have been involved, what’s more this had to happen to Little Innocent who in his grandstanding threw himself into the thing so energetically that the impossible occurred.

He was really named Little Innocent, this the first man to be executed that August. The son of Madame Innocent of Porte-Saint-Louis, not to be confused with Madame Innocent of Porte-Gaille, the mother of Yvette and Fernande. Little Innocent was fairly badly named, given that he was neither little nor innocent, but no one could do anything for this younger brother whose older brother had been named Big Innocent before him. It was if he had been branded by fate from birth always to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Quina was the only province that invented names that brought about hilarious associations in the midst of tragedy. And so let us imagine a Little Innocent inextricably compromised in an affair of double adultery followed by murder, rapid-fire executions, sordid revenge, all against the political background of a year when a presidential campaign was being prepared. The summer of 1956 will not be outdone by any other summer in Quina!

The affair, which was neither commonplace nor ordinary, grew nevertheless out of events which were conceivable in any province. A new and quite young junior officer fresh from the military academy would be stationed somewhere and would find himself delighted, with the help of his uniform, to be a little village Casanova, pursued by promising winks from ladies whose marital passions had grown cold. Some of these officers would succumb to a provincial melancholy against a background of boredom, especially the ones who came from the capital. The most recent to arrive in Quina had everything required to let himself be tempted by the calls of its Sirens: he came from Port-au-Prince, wore his khakis with a haughty air, and his kepi at a jaunty angle, while an attractive, perpetual smile indicated how highly he thought of himself. A future colonel, undoubtedly, or even a general, who knew? But for Quina he was just another stud, with all the risks implied by the term. The observers from the galleries did not give this latest arrival much of a chance as he passed by them morning and evening on the plaza, strutting to beat the band. The competing women would swallow him whole. And it was the very beautiful Madame Little Innocent who won this obstacle course among the chosen finalists.

It must be said, as a balm to the disappointment of the losers, that Madame Innocent was a woman from Fond-des-Blancs, blue-eyed, with a lovely mane of hair and black aquiline features. The ingredients of this beauty could be traced back to the Polish brigades of the War of Independence, who had deserted Leclerc’s French army to join the ranks of the indigenous army in the south. The racial mixture that was to result from this became a sort of Ethiopian type, the marabout that the local language had transformed into the diminutive boubout, a title for a woman who might elsewhere be called a lady friend, a girlfriend, a lover. My boubout. This lady was a boubout worth looking at twice. The little junior officer hadn’t a chance.

He took the shotgun blast from the front, point blank, while trying to jump over a fence at two o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, August 3, his trousers still at half-mast. Caught in the act, he had tried to flee. But it was buckshot meant for large quadrupeds which had wandered into other people’s fields. In Quina, a sort of common law said that any animal that had wandered out of its master’s enclosure to feed on forbidden fruits was considered wild game, and because of this was subject to being legitimately shot. The court-appointed defense attorney would later point out this analogy. The young officer had been found bloodless and bent in two over the barbed wire he was straddling, his crime perpetuated, as the defense will insist, and no form of help would be of any use to him with his chest wide open from the impact of the unforgiving buckshot.

Naturally, Little Innocent was not home that evening, and he was not arrested until around four o’clock in the morning, with dawn approaching, when he was quite simply returning to the conjugal home as if nothing was wrong. The crowd in front of his house and the swiftness of the police who took him into custody really seemed to surprise him. When his rights were read and he was shown the reason for his arrest (that was still done then, really; I was in the crowd of onlookers), he indignantly proclaimed his innocence as a town bourgeois, but refused categorically to say where he was at the time of the murder—of the execution, according to the defense lawyer, who will later plead justifiable homicide. The most he would say was that as a gentleman, it would be impossible for him to compromise a lady with whom he had spent the night. And so Little Innocent had no alibi; and what is more, he had all the motives. The case had the earmarks of revenge: the husband keeps watch, forces the lover to flee, and brings him down. What is more, Little Innocent was a good hunter and he knew (as did everyone else) that no ballistic tests could identify the twelve-gauge shotgun that had fired buckshot at the imprudent boy. He also knew that every family in Quina had at least one twelve-gauge and a few buckshot cartridges on hand. The investigation was turning out to be difficult, but everyone in Quina also knew that it was completely unlike Little Innocent to kill anyone, least of all his wife’s lover. He had lived with her for a long time under a nonaggression pact formed by old lovers whose fire has died out.

The case was handled quickly, under orders from above telephoned to the prefect by the general-president in person. This hinted at the approaching elections. The victim was a military officer and the leader, who had his eye on a reelection prohibited by the constitution, could not let the death of a young first lieutenant—guilty of adultery or not—go unpunished six months before the coup which he believed would bring about a second term. And so an extraordinary court session was decreed from Monday, August 9, to Friday, August 13, by the town authorities; and Little Innocent was immediately dragged before the judge who was assisted by a mixed civil and military jury composed of three soldiers and three civilians. It was unusual, but Quina had always made broad interpretations of the civil and military codes in effect in Port-au-Prince.

For five days, Little Innocent would take advantage of this unhoped-for platform to deliver a performance which those who were there fifty years ago still talk about. First, he made sure he would represent himself, in order to take the fullest advantage possible of his opportunities to speak. He claimed to have no knowledge of the facts before the time of his arrest, and that besides, his wife, his femme-chance (woman-through-luck), had no reason for self-reproach and nothing to justify, since she was assured of the honor of his highest esteem. That did not prevent him from having a mistress, like everyone else, his femme-douce (sweet-woman), whom he would not compromise for any reason, even to gain an alibi which would save him from death. He concluded each of his flights of oratory with C’est ainsi que les hommes vivent—That’s the way men live—addressing himself to the numerous youths present who would applaud and take up the refrain, singing it with him and imitating the voice of the great singer Léo Ferré, in spite of the judge’s threats of removal from the courtroom and the hammering of his gavel. That’s the way men live . . . and their sins follow them from afar. All that smacked of the end of a regime.

Toward the middle of the week, the matter of the letters arose in response to a question from the judge: if he could not provide a direct alibi through the testimony of the person he was with at two o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, August 3, was there some indirect alibi that would prove the existence of this liaison which was the only thing that could demonstrate his innocence? Yes, there were three letters, three marvelous letters written some ten years ago by his lover in such a sensuous style that he had reread them every day that God had granted him since receiving them. For ten years! In the face of his refusal to submit them as evidence, even if it might mean escaping a firing squad, the judge was reduced to asking him to outline their contents in order that their existence could be decided upon. That was the turning point of the trial. The testimony of Little Innocent was to reach a level of eroticism rarely heard in a courtroom. He knew by heart the three letters and their amorous laments, which he recited while acting them out, like the dubbing of a love scene in a porno film. At times, naughty sighs arose from the spectators’ section, which irritated the judge intensely, his eyes going from one row to another searching for the culprits. But when Little Innocent came to the salutation at the end of each letter, I kiss you everywhere you like to be kissed, daring to bring up that great feminine art, things had gone too far. The judge ordered that everyone under the age of twelve leave the courtroom so that the testimony could continue, rated “triple X,” he ordered the court reporter, who did not miss a word.

The next morning, Thursday, the judge imposed a court-appointed attorney and a gag on the defendant so that he would remain silent and the trial would not be drawn out interminably. On the insistence of the powers-that-be, it was necessary to bring in a verdict by Friday the thirteenth at the latest; which was a bad omen for everyone. That day, Little Innocent was found guilty of first-degree murder and condemned to death, not without a final scene created by the defendant, railing this time against his lawyer who, wishing to save him, requested the court’s leniency since this was a crime of honor committed by a cuckold. Hearing that word, Little Innocent had thrown himself on the lawyer, pouring out abuse on him for insulting his wife. Nothing remained but the task of setting the conditions of the execution in a ruling that would be given on the following Monday, August 16.

A crowd formed even before the trial reconvened, for if they expected the normal delays that would finally make the sentence null and void, there was also the fact that they were dealing with the army in a case of the murder of an officer. You see, it is well known in this country that laws are made of paper but bayonets are made of iron. The judge had obviously worked hard during the weekend, for he gave his ruling in a severe tone that brooked no protest. He ruled that Little Innocent had abused the court to such an extent that before he could be executed he was required to reimburse the State for the cost of the bullets in the Springfield rifles to be used by the firing squad; and what was more, he must pay off, through forced labor, the rental of his prison cell and the court costs incurred. All this was at the usual exorbitant interest rate of 1.5 percent per month commonly used by banks with embarrassing aplomb. Since Little Innocent was a pauper who ended up living from hand to mouth by the end of each month, he was insolvent and had no means of raising the round sum of six thousand three hundred and twelve gourdes and thirty-five centimes, which he was to pay by the end of August before the interest began to accrue, making the debt he was required to pay before he could be executed heavier each month. This ingenious idea on the part of the judge was commented on at length and with admiration—he must have dug deeply to come up with the Chinese tradition of making the condemned man pay for the bullets used to kill him, and with the Australian practice, used against illegal immigration, which required that stowaways refusing to leave of their own accord must reimburse the costs of their imprisonment through a life of forced labor. The judge must have kept late hours to come up with these penal curiosities, and all Quina showed him discreetly, with a more pleasant smile or a more marked doffing of a hat, the esteem in which they held him for his skillfulness. Little Innocent would not face the firing squad.

But two days later, in the sickly pale dawn of Wednesday, August 18 (for all such dawns are sickly pale), the second detonation of the month rang out. It was rumored that Little Innocent had been executed by the captain who had been assigned temporarily to the post during the crisis. He had carried out his orders immediately upon receiving an anonymous envelope containing exactly the sum the condemned man was required to pay before he could be executed. His task done, the officer went to the judge to give him the six thousand three hundred and twelve gourdes and thirty-five centimes in their original envelope. The town was in shock. All the ingredients for a riot were in place, and the authorities reported immediately to Port-au-Prince that something was brewing and the situation had to be defused. Who could have paid the ransom that wasn’t meant to be paid? The army, immediately suspect, swore that they had not done it, and you-know-who, at around eleven o’clock in the morning, telephoned the prefect for the second time to vindicate that institution and to promise an immediate investigation to find the anonymous donor. This was not necessary.

At noon precisely, a woman dressed all in black and heavily veiled in black crepe falling from an equally black wide-brimmed hat, crossed the plaza in front of the church where she had just gone to confession, and went to the courthouse where she brought proof that her jealous husband, the awful man from whom she had been separated for a long time, had arranged the whole thing—from the buckshot to the fine—to bring down her lover.

The third detonation of the month took place at the Angelus on Saturday, August 28, market day, against the wall of the cemetery adjoining the landing strip. No one jumped this time—all Quina, speechless with astonishment at the month’s events, was present.