by Maryse Conde
What was she doing in Cape Town among people with whom she had nothing in common? Their language seared her tongue. The taste of their cooking insulted her palate. Their music was no music to her ears. Everything was foreign to her. Suddenly, she couldn’t understand herself. Her faithfulness to Stephen’s memory and her intention to remain at his side seemed absurd. Mrs. Hillster was right: “The dead are always alone.”
After a while, Olu reappeared and announced:
“Cheryl would like you to stay for dinner.”
Rosélie refused straightaway. She didn’t want to intrude. She just wanted Chris Nkosi’s address. A mask of hostility immediately covered Olu’s face.
“Why? What do you want to know?” he asked.
Rosélie hesitated. What did she want to know?
“He was a good, hardworking boy,” Olu continued. “Quiet and obedient, until the honorable doctor, your husband, came and filled his head with stupid and dangerous ideas about the theater. Afterward, he liked to think himself as an artist. We didn’t know what to do with him. He almost failed his exams. He wanted to leave the country. Go to London. Did he have any money? Was he forgetting his color? He’d become a filthy immigrant, parked in a slum, the prey of skinheads. Who knows if he wouldn’t end up in jail? Or else convert to Islam and become a terrorist.”
It was obviously a joke. Rosélie gave a faint smile.
“It was in England I met Cheryl,” he continued. “That’s where we got married. I know what I’m talking about. What city is more racist than London? Its reputation as a multicultural paradise is an invention of intellectuals like Salman Rushdie, who, besides, emigrated to the United States.”
“I’d like to have a talk with Chris Nkosi,” pleaded Rosélie, who, despite the meandering conversation, had not forgotten the purpose of her visit.
“Talk about what?” he shouted angrily. “Leave him alone, for goodness’ sake! He’s deserved it.”
A worried look flared up at the back of his eyes. But she looked so unhappy that he sighed, went into his study, and came out grudgingly brandishing a piece of paper.
Chris Nkosi,
Govan Mbeki Primary School,
116, Govan Mbeki Street,
Hermanus, CO
“His wife’s pregnant,” he announced as if it were something important. “By this time, she might have given birth.”
Thereupon he dived back into his study. In short, if for Olu, Stephen’s bad influence boiled down to encouraging Chris, then it wasn’t anything very serious. In N’Dossou, a class of twelfth-graders had made a name for themselves performing brilliantly The Importance of Being Earnest on the occasion of the twenty-third birthday of the president’s fifth wife. (He had repudiated the first three. The fourth, who had opened a center for handicapped children and a maternity clinic, died in childbirth and was christened the African Evita Perón, the Holy Mother of the Nation. Way out in the bush, a thousand workers labored on the construction of a basilica in her honor that was to rival St. Peter’s and Yamassoukro’s in Côte d’Ivoire.) Some jealous folk had criticized this Westerner, this Stephen Stewart, in L’Unité, the single party’s single rag. In their opinion, staging The Importance of Being Earnest was not along the lines of Authenticity, but rather those of Alienation. Rosélie felt oddly reassured, without, however, admitting what she had feared.
She was deep in these troubling thoughts when Cheryl Ogundipe, draped in a black kimono and wearing a somewhat doleful expression, emerged from her bedroom.
O Love, you are a mischief maker. You’re rightly depicted as a blind god. You pounce without distinction on your prey and light the fires of passion.
Looking at Cheryl, even the keen eye of a Caribbean, apt at distinguishing the most subtle shades of color, would have hesitated. You could have mistaken her for a Scandinavian, given her fawn-colored torsade, her eyes the color of seawater, and her Cleopatra nose. She had a face studded with freckles. As if she had looked at the boiling sun of her native island through a sieve.
Rosélie reproached herself for being so surprised. Such contradictions are frequent. The brain, the heart, and sex, each goes its own way. Olu’s brain had followed the path of black activism. His heart and sex had led him into the trap of a mixed marriage. For Cheryl was the daughter of a white Jamaican Creole, descended from planters who had lost all their possessions, and an Irish mother whose family had never had any.
Outside the Caribbean, islands and continents drift to and fro. Borders lose their meaning. Differences become blurred. Languages no longer matter. Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba fit into one another like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle finally put together again. Immediately the conversation between these two Caribbean women took on an intimate tone.
“Olu says you don’t want to go home to Guadeloupe?” Cheryl inquired.
She too said “go home.” Go home to the island like going back into your mother’s womb. The unfortunate part is that once you’re expelled you can never go back. Go back and curl up. Nobody has ever seen a newborn baby turn back into a fetus. The umbilical cord is cut. The placenta buried. We have to walk bent double, but walk even so till the end of life.
“In some respect I can understand you. I swore I would never set foot again in Jamaica. When I was little I suffered agony. Because of our color, my brothers, my sisters, and me, the “guava whites” as you say in Guadeloupe, we were excluded. There was no place for us in the country of the Maroons. Twenty years later I return with a black husband. They find him too black. They make fun of his accent. They call him “alien.” But you can’t be serious about staying here. However much I adored Nigeria—we lived in Ibadan, I buried my firstborn and gave birth to two of my sons there, then there was the vitality, the music, and exuberance—this place makes me sick. It’s as if a shroud is covering it and underneath there is nothing but dead bodies. What’s more, if things go on as they are, AIDS will kill off all the blacks and the epidemic will have succeeded where the Afrikaners failed. That’s what causes all my allergies. It’s psychosomatic. Unfortunately, Olu will stay here until we’re both dead. He’s waiting. He’s hoping, day after day, for a nomination.”
Him too! Oh, these nominations, nominations for what, nominations for where, they are the aspiration of those whom revolutions and regime changes have passed by. They’re as slippery as an eel. Lucky are those who can catch one.
Two of the youngest children came in crying the never-ending tears of childhood. Cheryl patiently calmed them down and sent them back to their games.
“Yes, I had a daughter once, the first and only one,” she continued. “I carried her for eleven months. She clung to me, she didn’t want to let go. When finally the doctors extricated her from my womb with their forceps, she was dead. I too thought I was going to die. Ever since, I’ve had only boys. Why haven’t you had any children? It’s children, and children alone, who can brighten up our sad lives.”
Did I brighten up my parents’ lives? Decidedly not.
“Didn’t you want to have children?” Cheryl insisted.
It’s much too long a story. Let’s just say that first of all I didn’t want to be a mother. Then motherhood didn’t want me when perhaps I wanted it. Sometimes, I confess, I’ve dreamed of a son who would be both brother and lover. But I didn’t come here to talk about myself.
“Do you know Chris Nkosi?”
“Perhaps,” Cheryl replied with a shrug of the shoulders. “As if we don’t have enough on our hands with our own children, Olu takes care of all sorts of young people. He runs I don’t know how many associations. Boys and girls come and go at all hours of the day, sleeping, eating, and drinking. One of them, a handicapped teenager, stayed here for over a year. Olu stood up for him. Apparently his family thought he brought bad luck and his own mother wanted to kill him. In the end, I lose interest.”
The somewhat frugal dinner that followed was filled with babbling, while ketchup and glasses of Coca-Cola spilled over the tablecloth, fortunat
ely made of plastic. Cheryl reigned over everything with a gentleness that reminded Rosélie of Amy and Cousin Altagras. Some women make the decision to be a mother, nothing else, and stick to it. They close their ears to all the sirens of so-called success.
In the meantime, Olu carried on spouting vacuously.
Once the dinner was over and they had drunk the lemongrass tea, Cheryl and Rosélie promised to see each other again. A promise they would probably not keep, given the way their lives went in opposite directions. Olu offered to drive Rosélie back to Faure Street if she accepted to stop by the church of St. John the Divine in Guguletu, where he ran a choir on behalf of the unflagging Arte. As long as the mouth is filled with songs to the glory of God, it is not smoking marijuana!
In spite of its grandiose name, the church of St. John the Divine was a modest building of clay and straw. Inside there were rows of rough wooden benches. A poorly decorated high altar. It was revered throughout the country because the funerals of a number of ANC members assassinated by the police had been held there. It was from his humble pulpit that bishop Koos Modupe, as feisty as Desmond Tutu, even though he didn’t win the Nobel Prize—you know what I think about prizes—had given his famous sermon, shamelessly plagiarizing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream.”
All the Holy Joes look alike. At the back of the main nave, two nuns, as skinny as rakes, their nonexistent breasts flattened further by their navy blue serge wimples, kept thirty or so boys and girls at arm’s length, while a third, who was obese, beat out the rhythm perched on a platform. An invisible fourth was playing the organ way up in the rafters.
The choir was splendid.
From the throats of these gangly, ill-dressed teenagers, marred by malnutrition and deprivation, came celestial voices, the mystery of the language adding to the poetic power of the chant. Rosélie, who hadn’t set foot inside a church since Stephen’s funeral, knelt down, reliving the wonders of her childhood: Midnight Mass, Easter, and the Crowning of the Virgin Mary, all those ceremonies whose magic memory occasionally haunted her. She would have liked to lose herself in prayer like Rose, like the women in her family. She would have asked God for strength and courage in the trial she knew was looming like a huge black cloud over her head.
If the guidebooks call Hermanus the “whale capital” of South Africa, it is with good reason. Countless tourists can prove it. Standing in the right place on the cliffs, they have sighted with their own two eyes the humps of these beloved mammals piercing the metallic surface of the ocean. Many of them too have seen with their own two eyes whales, pregnant and heavier still, hastening toward the shore to deliver the fruit hidden in their swollen flanks. Sometimes they die before reaching the sheltered bays and their corpses float on the ocean waters like gigantic rubbery balloons. There is even a whale crier in Hermanus, dressed like a lighthouse keeper, who struts around in season with a loudspeaker through which he yells the latest sightings.
Hermanus lies seventy miles east of Cape Town. It takes about ninety minutes along the N2. But Papa Koumbaya insisted on driving the scenic route through Gordon’s Bay to show Rosélie the splendid views. Add to that the way he crept along, and you can understand why it took three hours to drive a relatively short distance. Then they crawled along streets uniformly lined with souvenir shops and fish restaurants, congested with cars, buses, and pedestrians. In short, the morning was almost over when the Thunderbird drove into the black township. Finally it stopped in front of the Govan Mbeki School, even more forbidding in appearance than the Steve Biko High School. Behind a wall topped with broken glass and the inevitable rows of barbed wire, a rectangle of yellow prefabricated buildings lined a recreation yard, as bare as a monkey’s behind. In a stifling room a young woman was typing on a typewriter that would have fetched a fortune in an antique shop. She did not even trouble to look up with her answer.
“Chris? He’s teaching. Come back at noon.”
It was half past eleven. Rosélie went back to the sidewalk and agreed to meet Papa Koumbaya later on in the center of town in front of the Paradise Ice Cream Parlor.
The black township of Hermanus was a jumble of small houses, shacks, and huts built from bits of corrugated iron, wooden planks, bunches of straw, wattle, dried mud and bricks, everything the ingenuity of misfortune can scrape together. Here, like in Khayelitsha, there was not a single flower, bush, or tree. A bare, reddish earth. As if Nature balks at growing anything green around shacks. Rosélie didn’t dare venture far from the school. What sort of a welcome would she get if she explored these alleyways? She was so used to hostility she imagined the inhabitants would come out on their doorsteps, yelling at her to go home, hurling insults, even stones. But didn’t she look like an intruder, even a spy, standing there in front of this walled enclosure?
After some time that seemed an eternity to Rosélie, the students filed out in a disciplined, orderly fashion, whereas boys and girls the world over jump for joy, whoop, and let off steam once school is out. The teachers followed somberly, carrying their briefcases. The same story of pitiful wages, poor housing, and no future was written all over their faces, obvious to anyone who knew how to read. Chris Nkosi looked younger, less handsome, and thinner in his crumpled, shabby clothes. He had shaved his dreadlocks, and his face, now exposed, appeared morose and unsmiling. Nothing like the conceited, confident Puck she remembered leaping over the stage. Before she had even made a move, he had recognized her and made straight for her.
“You? What are you doing here?” he asked savagely.
“I came to see you,” she stammered.
“To see me? Why?” he asked, just as infuriated.
She didn’t reply, stifled by his ferociousness. He grabbed her roughly by the arm and dragged her away.
“We can’t stay here. Everyone’s looking at us. Let’s go to my place.”
They set off into a maze of alleyways. As they delved deeper into this poverty, it was the cleanliness that was so amazing. For we always associate poverty with filth. Here, there wasn’t a single garbage heap. Not one animal dropping. Not a single piece of litter on what served as a sidewalk. Chris walked so fast, without any consideration for her, that she was out of breath, running like a child to catch up with him. Finally they arrived in front of two shacks separated by a narrow passage that led to a kind of tenant’s yard, also kept meticulously clean. The ground was covered with a mixture of gravel and white sand. Kitchen utensils were drying in the open. Dazzling lines of ragged washing were waving in the breeze. Chris pushed open a door into a living room that was about as dark and sparsely furnished as you get, and shouted:
“Brenda!”
A very young woman appeared, almost a teenager, in her last stages of pregnancy, shuffling along with a huge belly and heavy legs. He hurled a few words at her in their language and she turned and headed for the door like a frightened animal, without a glance at Rosélie.
“What have you come for?” he asked again.
Feeling weak, she collapsed into the only armchair and tried to regain her calm.
“I’ve come to give you Stephen’s computer.”
He frowned as if he had heard a bad joke.
“What do you expect me to do with a computer? We don’t even have electricity in the district. They’ve been promising it for over a year. But we’re still waiting for it.”
She couldn’t find anything to say.
“We’re in South Africa here, you know,” he sneered. “Not in America.”
“I’m not American,” she protested. “I’m from Guadeloupe. A country poorer than yours.”
Was she hoping to move him? He gestured in a way that signified he didn’t care whether she came from Mars, then repeated:
“What are you here for? What do you want from me?”
She didn’t know what to say. She could no longer understand why she was here.
“Your uncle told me you quarreled with Stephen,” she stammered.
“And so what?” he asked roughly
.
Discouraged, she got up. This conversation was getting them nowhere. She headed for the door, mumbling an apology for having disturbed him for no reason, when he called out to her.
“You’ve probably just realized that your Stephen was a bastard, haven’t you? Not at all the liberal, role model of a professor, benefactor of the young, whom everyone adored. A bastard!”
She turned round to face him, and with the determination of someone who wants to know, she quietly asked:
“Why are you saying that? What did he do to you?”
“Me?” he repeated.
There was silence. Suddenly he began to yell. He was not that far removed from the disproportionate tantrums of childhood. With a distorted face, he became unrecognizable.
“He was a liar and a manipulator. He promised me the world. That he’d get me a scholarship to study in London. He said he had connections at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I’d become an actor. I’d be another Paul Robeson. Better than Laurence Fishburne. I believed him. I believed him. Whereas, in actual fact…”
He collapsed onto the table, whimpering like a baby. She went over and placed a hand on his shoulder. He started.
“Don’t touch me!”
He sobbed for a long time while she stood motionless behind his back. He finally got hold of himself and methodically wiped his eyes, his cheeks, and his entire face. Then he stood up, jostling her almost, and coldly declared:
“I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you want to know. Besides, the police have already questioned me. At the time of his death I was in Hermanus, at Tanikazi’s, a neighborhood bar, playing darts. Twenty people can testify to the fact. Then I went home. Brenda and I made love. She can testify to that too.”
He stared at her spitefully.
