by Maryse Conde
“Thank you very much. We’ll write to you. Next!” the examiners would scowl.
She had no idea whom he had flirted with or whom he had desired. He seemed to emerge from the famous London fog in a sudden halo of light. She hadn’t the slightest idea of what his life in N’Dossou had been like before she moved in with her two metal trunks, her canvases, and her lenbe. She knew that at one time he had taken in Fumio, who had left behind pictures of his mother and two sisters and the boxes of makeup he used to parody the Kabuki actors in his famous one-man show. Since then, like all rebels, Fumio had settled down and no longer did full frontals. Thanks to his father’s connections, he had been appointed director of the Japanese Institute in Rabat. Stephen and he kept up a correspondence, never missing a birthday or Christmas card. Rosélie had never bothered her mind about it. Now she had to imagine what interested Stephen when he was not with her. Amateur theatricals.
Chris Nkosi.
The name seemed to loom up all of a sudden. Yet she realized that ever since her first visit to the Steve Biko High School, during the rehearsal for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the boy had caught her attention. His name had remained lurking in the folds of her memory, ready to emerge into broad daylight at the slightest call.
The tenth grade had been rehearsing at the Civic Center for Community Action. It was a kind of hangar where Arté had organized a book fair selling hundreds of copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, as well as a hip-hop festival. The teenagers were laboriously stumbling over Shakespeare’s lines. Except for Chris Nkosi, alias Puck, who sailed over his text, scaling new heights:
Through the forest have I gone,
But Athenian found I none,
On whose eyes I might approve
This flower’s force in stirring love.
He was handsome and arrogant, probably from receiving constant compliments. He wore his dreadlocks like a wig. She bitterly regretted not having asked Olu for his address. The very next morning she would go back to the school to get some answers out of him.
Once she had made this decision, a sense of serenity enfolded her, like a sick person who has long hesitated, then resigned herself to undergo an operation. Either she will die. Or her life will be spared. In either case, the suffering will stop.
She decided to go home.
The last noisy groups of customers were leaving Ernie’s and the remaining few restaurants still open. This district of Cape Town used to be out of bounds to blacks. In order to have access you needed a pass. Judging by the looks that bored into her, her presence was still out of place and a threat even today. If they had guns, these young people would use them. In all impunity. Justice would acquit them like it acquitted the four police officers who assassinated Amadou Diallo in New York. Legitimate defense. A black man is always guilty.
But of what?
Of being black, of course!
Precisely, a group was standing at a street corner.
She became scared, turned her back, and almost began to run; then got hold of herself and walked back up the street. When she arrived level with them, she confronted them. A crowd of youngsters, almost teenagers. Squeezed into leather jackets. The boys wore their hair in a crew cut; the girls in a ponytail. Harmless. Their minds were on other things. The boys thinking how best to persuade the girls to come back to their place, and the girls wondering if it was still worth hanging on to what remained of their virginity.
As Stephen used to lament, once again she was making a song and dance about nothing.
She reached Faure Street.
She resolutely pushed open the door to Stephen’s study. This was the second time she had entered since he died. While he was alive, she hadn’t gone in very much either. Neither had Dido, who, with broom and vacuum cleaner, complained bitterly that she was kept out. She flipped the switch and the light flooded the paintings, the books packed against the walls, the sagging armchair, the heavy desk and its disparate ornaments: a Tiffany lamp, a miniature globe, and a stone paperweight from Mbégou. It was as if the room, motionless and silent, were waiting for its owner to return. As if Stephen’s restless personality were still palpitating. It was here he worked for hours on end amid a din of jazz turned up full volume—which always amazed Rosélie—where he read and watched his beloved opera videos. Rosélie had always felt that this part of his life rejected her. That she was not welcome. The attention diverted to her wretched self distracted him from higher preoccupations. She had none of the qualities to rival James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, or Synge. For the very first time she wondered what other interests, perhaps even less noble, absorbed him.
You don’t improvise being a voyeur, however. It’s not like an old pair of jeans you slip on whenever you want to. It has to be ingrained.
She was no sooner inside than a deep malaise gripped her. It seemed she was committing an indiscretion. That Stephen would come in at any minute and ask her, amused:
“What are you looking for?”
Yes, what was she looking for?
An icy cape settled around her shoulders. She was ashamed of herself. She was no better than a grave robber. She knew Stephen threw his keys into a Mexican pot on the window ledge. But when she was at the point of opening the drawers, she lost her nerve. The bunch of keys slipped from her hands and rolled onto the carpet. She quickly switched off the light and dashed outside.
She sat for a moment in the garden. Not a sound. In the distance a few cars rattled up the avenue. She went back up to the haven of her bedroom, put on her nightdress again, and went back to bed. The bed was cold. Cold and empty. She thought of Faustin and burst into tears, not knowing whether she missed him or Stephen more.
Rosélie seldom cried. Tears are a luxury that only children and the spoiled can afford. They know that a sympathetic hand is always there to dry them. She hadn’t cried when Salama Salama cheated on her. She hadn’t cried when she stood in front of her mother’s body, eyelids finally closed, guarded by candles at the bottom of Doratour the undertaker’s monstrous casket. She hadn’t cried when Stephen died.
There hadn’t been a wake. Rough handled back from the morgue midmorning by mindless coffin bearers, the heavy oak casket had been laid to rest in the middle of the living room, gradually smothered in wreaths from the university, schools, neighbors, and anonymous sympathizers. Around noon, they no longer knew where to put them. They were piled up in scented heaps just about anywhere. Emotions were running high in the rooms on the ground floor and in the garden, where people—mostly whites, but also some blacks—students, musicians, and artists who had known and loved Stephen, were praying side by side.
Nkosi Sikelei Afrika.
Yes God, bless this country. Forgive it the terrible things that go on here!
The head of the funeral cortege reached the church while the end of it was still filing past the Mount Nelson Hotel. Many of the mourners remained outside in front of the church before setting off for the cemetery.
There was a crowd too for Rose’s funeral. But it was different in her case. With its merciful scythe death had cut short the years of suffering and exclusion. As for Stephen, it had been shockingly unjust, striking down a man, still young in years, talented and beloved by all. On each occasion, Rosélie walked behind the coffin with a mechanical stride, not a tear in her eye and a face so bone dry it was as if she had no feelings. Consequently, nobody took pity on her.
That night, however, she cried. With tears that welled up from a never-ending source deep within her. It was like the rain on certain days during the rainy season when it begins in the predawn hours, slows down in the evening only to pour even harder in the darkness stretching to infinity, and continues until morning. The rivers then overflow their bed and the whole island smells of mud and mustiness. This constant patter of rain finally sent her to sleep with a dream. Or rather a succession of dreams, nightmares in fact, one after the other, exterior day, exterior night, like sequences in a film without words or music.
It
was daylight. Was she in Guadeloupe? Or in Cape Town? The crowd was gone. The cemetery was empty. The raging sun was heating the great steel plate of the ocean. At intervals, birds of prey swooped out of the sky onto their quarry, visible only to them through the molten metal. She was looking for a grave. Her mother’s? Stephen’s? But however much she walked up and down the paths, turning right, then left, she couldn’t find it. Suddenly, everything around her disappeared. She was lost in a desert of sand and dunes. Nothing but dunes. Nothing but sand. Nothing but sand. Nothing but dunes. Overhead, the calotte of sky was shrinking and the raving maniac in its middle continued to pound even harder.
It was night. She was lost in a forest as dense as N’Dossou’s. Not a single hut. Only tree trunks, eaten by moss and epiphytes, their branches smothered in moving creepers like the arms of a giant. Suddenly, the trunks got closer and closer. They squeezed and crushed her while the boa vines wrapped themselves around her body.
It was daylight. The footpath wound through the grass, which promptly parted in front of her. Nature reigned supreme, everything in its place. The sun way up above, pouring down its usual dose of molten lead. The cottony white clouds, stuck to the blue by the heat. On the horizon, the rigid, triangular-shaped mountains. Suddenly the path turned at a right angle. A farm stood out against a quadrilateral of gnarled vines, planted at regular intervals like crosses. Closer to her was a cornfield. A woman was waiting, angular in her black dress, leaning against the tin siding of the main building. When Rosélie walked up, the woman turned her head and Rosélie recognized her. It was Fiela!
Fiela was wearing an open-neck blouse, as if she were going to the guillotine. Her tiny slit eyes and her face, with its triangular-shaped cheekbones, betrayed no sign of fright. No sign of remorse either. In actual fact, no feeling. It was one of those impenetrable faces that disconcert ordinary people. Rosélie thought she was seeing her twin sister, separated from her at birth and found again fifty years later, like in a bad film.
She went up to her and murmured:
“Why did you do it?”
Fiela stared at her and said reproachfully:
“You’re asking me? You’re asking me?”
The sounds that came out of her mouth were guttural, very low, and startling like those of an instrument out of tune.
“I did it for you! For you!”
Thereupon Rosélie woke up, soaked in sweat, her nightdress stuck to her back like in one of her childhood fevers.
The moon shamelessly displayed her belly of a pregnant woman.
SIXTEEN
When she showed up again in his office, Olu Ogundipe had that worried look of someone who has sighted a hurricane looming on the horizon. Yet Rosélie had nothing threatening about her. Instead she was rather shattered and slumped into an armchair. Around her on the walls, all of Olu’s beloved heroes stared down at her fixedly. Always the same reproach. What had she done for the Race?
“What have you come to give me this time?” Olu said mockingly, not at all hostile. “Another computer?”
She didn’t answer, tortured by a sudden urge to burst into tears. He was quick to see it and took an even softer stand.
“I was about to leave. My wife isn’t too well, it’s her allergies, I have to go and pick up my older children from school. Would you like to come with me? We can have tea at my place.”
She hesitated, and once again he poked fun at her.
“You’re a pretty woman. But this isn’t a trap. We know how to behave. Do we frighten you?”
Telling him that she hadn’t always been the mistress of a white man and that her first partner had been an African would serve no purpose. The stereotypes about Antillean women die hard. They are supposed to hate and despise Black Skins. Rosélie hadn’t the energy to put up a fight and she let him talk away.
“I know the Caribbean. I lived for three years in Kingston and came up against all sorts of humiliations. I’ve nothing against my in-laws. Admirable people. But Cheryl’s family and friends accused her of soiling her sheets with a nigger, black like me. If we ourselves don’t like our color, how can we blame the whites for not liking it?”
All this time he was signing a dozen letters with a majestic flourish.
They went out and crossed the deserted recreation yards that echoed with students’ voices from every classroom, chanting lessons and singing a cappella. The sounds merged and composed an unexpected and appealing polyphony.
Olu got onto his favorite subject of conversation: the future of South Africa.
“You’d think Césaire had this country in mind when he wrote The Tragedy of King Christophe. Do you remember? ‘So here we are at the bottom of the ditch! The very bottom of the ditch! I’m talking of a spectacular ascent!’ I think it’s the most wonderful piece of theater. What do you think?”
Rosélie had only read Notebook of a Return to My Native Land by Césaire, which Salama Salama recited by heart. He dreamed of putting it to rap, cleverly beating out the lines:
“Get lost I said you cop face, you pig face, get lost, I hate the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Go away bad grigri, bedbug of a monklet.”
In the end, the fear of sacrilege stopped him.
Without being disheartened by so much ignorance, Olu continued.
“Give us a few more years and we’ll be the leaders of Africa! I’m not talking only in economic terms, gross national product, gross domestic product, but in terms of culture.”
Art and culture are necessary compensations for the misfortune of our lives. (Once again.)
They reached the car. The ageless Nissan uttered a series of coughs and started up. The cheerful aspect of the school, a Catholic day school, made it look out of place in the general landscape. Olu’s older children turned out to be three kids of an unexpected coffee color ranging from nine to twelve years. They spontaneously held up their cheeks for Rosélie to kiss and she was filled with emotion by such a gesture. It was as if they, the children, absolved her and were giving her back the place the adults had excluded her from.
Olu lived in Esperanza, a district still under construction on the outskirts of Cape Town. Neither township nor residential suburb. Its inhabitants belonged to the laboring middle class trying to emerge from the ashes of apartheid. His villa, like all the others, was surrounded by a concentration camp–type wall, topped by thick rows of barbed wire. And behind, you could hear the barking of hounds, straining furiously on their chains.
“Gangs operate around here,” he explained. “Loafers and good-for-nothings who don’t want to do a day’s work. Let’s not close our eyes, there’s a lot to be done. I’ll quote once more The Tragedy of King Christophe: We are ‘schoolteachers brandishing a ruler in the face of a nation of dunces!’”
A nation of dunces? Did Césaire say that? Not a very nice remark!
Three other small boys, again coffee colored, ranging this time from four to six years, were playing in a patch of garden. They broke off to hurl themselves on their father with Sioux-like yells, then, in a charming ensemble, held up their warm cheeks for Rosélie, who, this time, almost burst into tears. The living room looked like Olu’s office, but more chaotic. The leather sofa and three armchairs were streaked with scratch marks, the Moroccan rug lay crooked. The same dusty photos. In their frames the great men, now dust to dust, struck a sorry pose. Okay, they left behind their books. But who reads them? What is their legacy?
Nobody reads anymore. Everyone watches American sitcoms on television.
My favorite: Sex and the City.
Olu was proud of a set of snapshots placed on top of the inevitable piano in petty bourgeois interiors, between the inevitable bunch of artificial flowers.
“You see,” he said, priding himself, “that’s Césaire and me at Saint-Pierre in Martinique. This is Césaire and Cheryl. He liked her a lot. And here we are all three of us, Césaire, Cheryl, and me, at Le Diamant. Behind us the famous rock. Do you know Martinique?”
Rosélie sho
ok her head. In the Caribbean she only knew Kingston, Jamaica, where she had gone with Salama Salama to a reggae festival. She didn’t remember much about this paradise turned hell on earth under the combined effects of crack and ganja. They had been advised to stay in their suite at the Sheraton because of the violence. She had lived in a cloud of smoke and only went out to lie by the pool in the shape of a peanut. When Salama Salama wasn’t around, a barman from the Dominican Republic served her trujillos, an explosive mixture of rum, lemon, cane syrup, and tomato juice with a dash of Marie Brizard, while leering at her breasts. According to Salama Salama, his concert, which she hadn’t attended, had been a triumph.
“I’ve been to Trinidad, Montserrat, Antigua, and Barbados,” he bragged again. “Haiti is my favorite island. The most African, the only one of its kind, you could say. That’s where I really felt at home. You know what the Haitians call a man, whatever his color? A Nègre. The day will come when Noirisme, that theory they’ve so distorted, will be rehabilitated.”
Then he disappeared to look after his wife, leaving Rosélie faced with a lukewarm glass of Lipton teabags served up by a domestic in none-too-clean overalls. Large families live in an atmosphere of disorder created by the children—toys lying about on the rugs, teatime remains left on the table, and a constant noise of squabbling, tears, and cries, things that stab at the heart of the lonely. Sitting in this unattractive room where the windows covered by a grid of solid bars let in little light, Rosélie had never felt so vulnerable. She was reminded of the tribe she had grown up in, on days spent at the beach with aunts, uncles, and cousins. It required half a dozen cars to transport everyone, dozens of hampers to carry all the food, and at least three iceboxes for the drinks. Rose, of course, didn’t accompany them. No question of undressing in public ever since a little nephew had compared her in a fit of laughter to Bibendum, the Michelin Man. But Elie was there, trim and muscular, swimming agilely in his striped swimming trunks.
