Waiting for Tomorrow

by Nathacha Appanah

  “Very good. Until tomorrow, madame, and congratulations on your bravery.”

  “Goodbye.”

  They leave unhurriedly, closing the door. The rays of the sun, broken up by the slats of the shutter, fall upon the ground, the bed, the bedside table, and Adèle’s bag, plainly visible.

  Later Adèle calls Cecilia Lesparet. It is 2:00 and Madame Lesparet is at home.

  “I waited for you, Adèle. I telephoned. I left at least five messages! The children didn’t want to go to school without you. I had to stay at home, I couldn’t find anyone to take your place. They’ve been impossible all morning. I don’t know what’s got into them. I haven’t had a minute to myself.”

  Cecilia Lesparet is pacing up and down in the kitchen. The children are watching a film in the living room, their minds and bodies immobilized for a moment. She knows it will only take a trifle for them to come to life again like hyperactive jumping jacks. She can hear her own rather grating voice quickly becoming shrill (her own mother’s voice). She knows she must be understanding, it was an accident, there was an accident, Adèle was flung out of a bus, for heaven’s sake, she is in the hospital, but Cecilia cannot stop herself. She is still shaking from that cataclysmic morning when the clock had struck 8:00, and the children were so noisy, when the house was in chaos and she was waiting, motionless, dressed, with her makeup on, in the kitchen. She was fending off shouts from upstairs with an improvised mantra: “Adèle’s coming, Adèle’s just coming, Adèle’s going to be here any minute now, Adèle will take care of it.” But no. She didn’t come. She didn’t call. She had dared not to.

  Cecilia dreaded finding herself alone with her children, dreaded things being like this every day, dreaded losing Adèle, this perfect nanny, who inspired the envy of all her friends. This was different from the constant and almost comforting fear of losing her children or her husband, it is more like the dread of being burgled while on vacation, or getting a scratch down the side of her new car, or of the new coffee machine not matching up to the price she paid for it.

  When Cecilia had taken Adèle on seven years before (she had answered the advertisement in impeccable, if somewhat nineteenth-century, French), she had already tried out five nannies. She had only one child at the time. He was eighteen months old and not yet walking. They lived in an apartment in the city with a balcony that gave a partial view of the sea. Pascal had installed three small cameras in the apartment without telling the nannies, the way they do in the United States, he said, and at the end of each of their trial weeks the five nannies had been thanked. Nothing serious: the child in front of the TV already in the morning, closets opened in the bedrooms, perfumes sampled, the child left crying for a long time, the housework hardly done, an afternoon nap taken in the master bedroom.

  Then came Adèle in her Corsican widow’s black dress, with her soft voice and her shaven head. Cecilia remembers the pictures from the cameras. She was certainly no Mary Poppins but, unlike the others, she took the child in her arms, she showed him things, and, above all, she played with him. Four days later the child had stood up on his two legs and toddled over to pick up a toy car.

  They left the apartment, moved into the house, had two more children, changed jobs, went through a rocky patch in their marriage after the birth of the third, and made things up on a second honeymoon in the Maldives, but Adèle was always there somewhere, in the shadows on a photograph, in the corner of her eye, in the smell of the wax she polishes the furniture with on Fridays, in the perfect creases of the ironed sheets, in the way she manages the children’s hair after it has been washed, the parting on one side, unfamiliar eau de cologne behind the ears. The children love that. Obliging Adèle, kind Adèle, discreet Adèle, perfect Adèle.

  Adèle has never been late, has never failed to turn up, and did not even object when she learned about the cameras, and Cecilia pays her in cash. Oh, the recriminations their friends who did not film their nannies used to get involved in, forever ranting and complaining about them. The Lesparets never went on about the tedious routines of paperwork, claiming that their arrangement was one between consenting adults, like a free union. They could part company from one day to the next and because of this, it is precisely because of this, they used to say, this lack of any contract, of any formal constraints, that it worked. And their proof of this was seven years of good and faithful service and the three children in good health. Which one of their friends could show them such a track record?

  They slipped her restaurant coupons, cinema tickets, some extra cash, double in December, gifts at Christmas, vacation souvenirs. Sometimes, when the holiday season was near, Cecilia would wonder whether she should get a little closer to Adèle, break the ice between employee and employer. (So, tell me, Adèle: What are you doing for the holidays? Do you have a boyfriend, maybe a girlfriend, a cat?) But she never did it, never found the right moment, and by the time it got to January 5 she was congratulating herself on this. She knew all she needed to know about Adèle: she looked after the children and the house well and was irreproachably honest.

  “Five messages, Adèle. I left you five messages. So what time are you planning to come?”

  Cecilia knows she should hold her peace but this is stronger than her. She feels betrayed. Instead of thinking about the number of times Adèle has helped them out at weekends, during vacations, at a moment’s notice, instead of counting her days of absence (none), the times she has been late (fewer than five), Cecilia Lesparet is thinking about all those restaurant coupons slipped into the monthly envelope, the extra cash here and there, the designer clothes, the leather handbags, the chocolates, the macarons, the soaps, the perfumes, all the things she has been giving Adèle for years.

  “Adèle? Are you there? I could come and pick you up if you like. Are you at the teaching hospital?”

  On the far side of the city Adèle does not reply. Perched outside the window on a median strip there is a black crow. It gleams in the sunlight and looks enormous. For a moment nothing seems to be happening. Just this bird, motionless and shiny beneath the blue dome of the sky.

  Do not Buddhists believe there are several moments contained within a single snap of the fingers and all it needs is an instant of awareness for you to wake up and change your life?

  Adèle thinks about the moment when the door closed on the two policemen just now with a little click. Is such a moment all it takes? Does that little muted noise contain the whole of her future life?

  The crow suddenly turns its powerful beak toward Adèle. It makes a swift, abrupt horizontal movement of its head. Once, twice, three times.

  “No.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “No. I can’t come today. I need to rest.”

  “But you’ve no right to do that! Do you have a medical certificate?”

  “Yes, I’ll send it to you. I’m very sorry, Madame Lesparet, but I need to look after myself. I’ll call you next week. Give the children a kiss from me.”

  Adèle hangs up, steps out into the soft light of this early March day. The crow is no longer there. Now everything is clear.

  The concert

  THE MOON HAS RISEN SOFTLY ABOVE THE HORIZON and casts a pale yellow light over the sleeping city. The carousel is closed, the children are in bed, the chairs on the café terraces have been stacked away, the blinds on the stores lowered. A woman crosses the square rapidly, a shoulder bag held against her hip. She is wearing jeans, with a flowery silk top, a cotton jacket, and leather shoes so flat they look like dancing shoes. She has gathered her hair back into a ponytail. On the far side of the square, before walking down the few steps that lead to the Tropical’s parking lot, she suddenly turns toward the sea and the moon lights up her face with a pale glow. Anita smiles.

  When the singer with his dense mop of yellow hair begins shaking his kayamb, when the light picks him out with the dust whirling around him like sequins, when he begins his maloya chant, Anita and Adèle—one of them close to the stage, the other at the
bar—both feel the same thrill pass through them. They do not understand all the words but these find a way deep into the pit of the stomach, precisely where for the first time each had felt her baby stirring—it is an inner effervescence. This creole blues awakens something within them that comes from far away, from the time when they used to dance free as air, when there were no lies, no dramas, when there were simply the endless, untroubled days of their childhood.

  Anita hastily writes down in her notebook the lines that she wants to quote in her article. She is absorbing the totality of this concert: the palms raised to heaven, the heads bowed as if in prayer, the man close to her slowly swaying from right to left, his hands moving like waves, the straps of the dresses sliding over gleaming shoulders, the shirts clinging to backs, the smiles. The photographer from the paper is there as well, he greets her from afar, as if she were a colleague of long standing. She makes a note of the names of the instruments, the change of mood when the drum joins in, she exchanges a few words with some of the audience. She is often interrupted by the club’s manager, Denis, who follows her everywhere, and seems interested above all, he says, in her “career path.” He wants to know where she was born, when she came here, if she is married, how long she has worked on the paper.

  At the end of the concert Anita meets the musicians backstage, there is a holiday atmosphere, she is welcomed with open arms, they let her hold their instruments, they fall silent as she interviews the singer, who peers at her myopically through his thick glasses. The backup singers, superb young women, their fiery manes tied back with cotton scarves, smoke, argue, drink, or are simply there. These are women of the same age as Anita who eye her with benevolence. Anita would like to stay with them and ask them questions that have nothing to do with the concert: do they have husbands, children, how do they summon up the confidence and strength needed to leave their families for days at a time, how do they make sense of all those long hours on the road, the cramped backstage quarters, what is it that happens so mysteriously and magically when they are on stage? Anita feels like a friend, a sister of theirs, they are the same color.

  When, regretfully, she takes her leave of the musicians, Denis offers her a drink. It is already 11:30. They are leaning against the bar and Denis beckons to the barmaid.

  “What are you drinking?”

  He accompanies his question with a gesture—tilting his head back with his thumb to his mouth.

  “A Coke, please.”

  “A Coke? Come on! We have good homemade punch. We have beer from Mauritius, rum from Mauritius. It’s on the house.”

  “It’s very kind of you, monsieur, but I have to get back to the office to write my article. It appears tomorrow, you know.”

  Who does she think she is, this woman? Denis says to himself. For several days he has been broadcasting it to all and sundry, the woman from the paper, the woman from the paper, the woman from the paper, they had got on well on the telephone, he had made her laugh, something about rum and the heat, the classic quip he saves for customers who are native-born French, the well-worn cliché about islands, with their sleepy inhabitants and their easy life. It was the first time that an event organized at the club was going to be covered in the press and he was going to pamper her, this woman from the paper. He had evidently formed a very clear picture of her, this reporter, who called him “monsieur” on the telephone. Barely forty with half-length blond hair, one of those women who still wear ripped jeans and flaunt their bikinis on the beach. Possibly divorced, two teenage children, she watches American TV series with them, smokes a joint from time to time, never votes, but has an opinion on everything. Her face is beginning to show the signs of overexposure to the sun. She likes dancing, prefers the company of men to that of women, she’s white. When Anita appeared before him and introduced herself he felt almost vexed, as if he had been cheated on the goods he had ordered.

  So, how had she got here? Was she born here? What schooling had she had? How old was she? He would never have ventured questions like this with anyone else but, as he himself had a grandmother from Mauritius, he has the curiosity of a distant relative. But Anita sidesteps, she responds to his questions with other questions, and suddenly he gets the message. She’s assimilated. Oh yes, he’s met others like her, these immigrants who’ve gone far beyond what was expected of them, who live either in the center of the city or in some village in the forest, they have houses in the country, they go to Paris for the holidays, they don’t have a trace of an accent. They smear themselves with sunscreen all summer because they don’t want to tan even if no one can see the difference, they know the fashionable restaurants, marry locals, call their children Clovis or Marianne, are experts at tasting wine, love runny cheese, and can’t abide chili peppers anymore. They never come to the Tropical, they go to the Cercle, downtown, which plays sanitized and packaged world music on Friday nights. When these assimilated immigrants meet a compatriot they smile faintly, as people do at the poor, the ignorant, the unfortunate. The woman from the paper had done just that when he asked her precisely where on Mauritius she had been born.

  A Coke! Whatever next? (A milkshake?)

  “So I guess you’re like the cops in the movies, are you? You don’t drink when you’re on duty?”

  And suddenly she laughs. All at once she reminds him of those shy young women who hide their mouths when they laugh, as if they had bad teeth. Maybe he’d judged her too hastily? It’s clear she’s eager to write a good article.

  “All right. Just a tiny glass of punch.”

  Denis leans across the bar and literally yells: “Adèle! Adèle!”

  Then he turns back to Anita and she smiles at him in the most open and dazzling manner possible.

  “The barmaid comes from Mauritius, like you.”

  “Is that so? I really like your club. I’ll come back here.”

  Denis had definitely been mistaken that evening.

  Anita delivers her copy at 1:00 in the morning. Fifteen minutes later the news editor calls her to tell her in a warm voice that all is well, the piece is “perfect,” and she can go home.

  But Anita lingers in the empty reporters’ room. She walks over to the big bay windows that look out over the square, she strolls around, inhaling deeply, as if she wanted to breathe it all in and keep it within herself: the Post-it notes stuck to screens, the titles of books on desks, the personal photographs pinned up with thumbtacks or in frames, the quotations on the walls, the posters, the tourist pictures. She keeps her hands behind her back, as in a museum, so as to touch nothing, disturb nothing. Anita likes this place and can still feel the effects of the adrenalin, that mixture of excitement and stage fright when she had to sit down and write, when she had to condense everything she had seen, learned, and felt during the evening into five hundred words. But when her fingers began tapping away, everything around her had disappeared. Oh, the feeling of being a woman engaged in creation, one who is unsinkable, useful, one who does her work well, and is fully present in every one of her thoughts, her emotions, her desires!

  When she leaves the building she is still clinging a little to this euphoria, as one clings to the lingering haze of sleep, she does not want to go back home right away, she wants to go on being this blossoming, independent woman for a little longer. She knows that in a few hours’ time, things will become real, less romantic. With a firm but light tread she retraces her footsteps. Anita goes back into the club. She wants to listen to music, sip an elegant amber alcoholic drink (alone at 1:00 in the morning! after writing her first story as a real reporter!).

  Inside there are fewer people than earlier on and the music now is disco. The musicians of the group from Réunion have left. They had another concert to go to the next day thirty miles away. Anita is aware of a sudden impulse to run after them, follow them, linger in the warm, golden wake of their music. Would she have given in to this impulse if she had been younger, with no husband, no child? Anita likes to think that at the age of thirty-five she would st
ill have had the courage to do it, as she likes to believe that, as of tomorrow, she could abandon all her bourgeois comforts, live in a tent, start all over again.

  She settles on a stool, one elbow on the bar. All the vibrant animal energy—those figures standing there with uplifted arms, that music—has vanished and it is as if she were in a totally different place now, and had dreamed it all. Nothing catches her eye, no colors, no shapes, though Anita is not impervious to such things. She is floating in some kind of aura that is soft, hazy, maybe a little sad, an aura with a stale smell of alcohol. Good and evil, light and darkness, success and failure, responsibilities and freedom, doubt and conviction, family and solitude, fervor and cowardice, equality and submissiveness, none of this exists anymore.

  Suddenly.

  An arm, a gleam of light on a silver bracelet, the tall figure of a woman dressed in black, a face dominated by a moving mouth. Open, shut, open.

  “I’m sorry? I didn’t hear.”

  “I was asking if you’d like something to drink. I’m going to close the bar soon. I still have some punch left.”

  “Yes, it was very good, that punch. What’s your name, by the way?”

  This question came out as softly as a breath of air, something emerging from who knows where and settling between two people.

  “Adèle.”

  “Adèle … that’s pretty.”

  “It’s not my real name, you know.”

  That, too, came out as calmly as hello, how are you today, what would you like. Adèle feels a tingling all over her body, but she does not fall to the ground, she does not flinch, nor is this, as they say in books, a moment of truth.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Look. I won’t drink anything. But may I stay here for a moment?”

  “Sure. We close in half an hour.”

  “Are you going home after that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to have a stroll on the beach with me? It’s not cold at all. After that, I’ll drop you off. I have a car.”