“And will your father be at your talk?”
“He doesn’t know I’m here,” I say.
“Oh, of course he does, I beg your pardon,” says Monsieur Urbain.
“I hope he won’t come to the talk,” I say somewhat curtly.
I want Monsieur Urbain to understand that it would be a good idea to dissuade my father from attending the symposium.
“That’s not his world, and he wouldn’t be comfortable,” says Marie.
“He looks on literature with loathing and contempt, you understand,” I add.
Whereupon Monsieur Urbain wraps himself in a mildly irked silence, as if he were the subject of this conversation, as if my father, disguised as Monsieur Urbain, were showing his irritation at being described in this way. But I know well that my father wouldn’t be offended at all, that he’d be proud to hear himself spoken of as an enemy of novelists, for in his eyes literature is a failing. That’s why he heaps mocking disdain on men who write, men more than women, who can in fact, he believes, bear that stigma with a certain glamour, so long as they’re pretty. That’s how my father is — my father, whom, it’s very clear, you will never, by word or by deed, succeed in convincing of anything whatsoever. You can curse him, call down every possible disaster upon him, and then, without his noticing, without his even being able to imagine such a thing, find yourself forgiving him, if only so as to be humiliated no more by that needling, pointless exasperation, by that petulant, impotent rage. That’s how my father is, I then think to myself, light-heartedly. And this is how Monsieur Urbain is, who, forgetting his duties as a host, clings to his vexed silence as we drive down the narrow rutted road toward the Cultural Center. At one point, though, he turns toward us and points at a large pink stucco building, brand-new, separated from the road by an iron fence with spikes on the bars.
“That’s my house,” he says, “and it was your father,”—he adds proudly, as if taking some obscure sort of revenge (but is he avenging fathers, Africans, disparagers of literature?)—“it was your father who designed it.”
Marie and I can’t help laughing, amiably, but surely with a hint of involuntary savagery, as well.
“I’m sorry, we’re clearly not talking about the same person,” I say. “Whomever you’re thinking of, he can’t possibly be my father. My father is not an architect.”
But even as I speak these words, a hesitation, an uncertainty turns my gaze away from Monsieur Urbain’s nape. I begin to doubt my own objections. I ask:
“Really, my father’s an architect? I didn’t know.”
Then, vaguely, a very distant time comes into my memory, a time when, as a child, I might possibly have heard my father alluding to construction problems, intractable difficulties of design. Unless, I tell myself, I’m making that memory up and don’t even know it, unsettled as I am by Monsieur Urbain’s claims.
“Your poor father,” he says simply, by way of an answer.
Still fearing he might appear in the lecture hall, not wanting him to hear me speak, or to unleash a barrage of humiliating, naively belligerent questions that would only reveal the depth of his cultural ignorance and bad faith, Marie and I hire a cab to pay a call at my father’s house that very night. He lives in the outskirts of Ouagadougou, and I’m surprised to find myself being driven through a sort of tangled, ramshackle suburb, not at all the kind of genteel neighborhood he always chose to settle in. All the same, the house we pull up to is presentable, moderately large, its stucco in need of repair. A woman is sitting in the fading light of the yard. She’s my stepmother, the one I know from before, who was my great friend as a teenager. Her ample body is wrapped in a green and black boubou. She’s staring at the ground between her wide-spread legs, hands flat on her knees, still and enigmatically idle, but on seeing us she immediately sits up and comes scurrying to meet me. She clasps me to her bosom, and I feel as though I were rediscovering the softness and sweet scent of her high-school girl neck, that slightly insistent way of pressing her cheek against mine before planting the ritual kiss. Moved, I begin to wonder if it really was to see my father, and not my stepmother, that I came all this way — and then back comes the tinge of sadness that’s always veiled my thoughts about her, linked to the certainty that she abandoned her vocation, her free will, her joyousness, just to become one with this man, my father, whose life was nothing more than a long string of disenchantments, who appeared before her, my slightly gullible friend, in a beguiling aura of counterfeit ebullience, my fatuous father, so taken with himself, so jealously protective of his thinness, so little able to succeed in anything whatsoever.
Clasped in my stepmother’s arms, I don’t dare whisper in her ear: “Don’t you want to come away with us? Leave him, come on, leave him!”
Because, ever since her marriage, she’s no longer my friend and my equal. She belongs to the generation before me. And besides, do I really have the right to take such measures for the purpose of hurting my father? Why hurt him, when I’ve come here for no other reason than to show him my affection? I’m free to forget or neglect him, if I like, I’m free to consider him dead — why come here and try to do him harm? He married my friend, but that’s no reason, I tell myself, to want to punish him.
A little later, my father appears. And all those bad thoughts I was thinking, all my dreams of confiscating his wife, I choke them all back and renounce them, the moment I see my father feeling his way along the walls and realize he’s now almost blind. He pretends there’s nothing wrong, and welcomes us into his home as if he could actually see us. A kind of dull-white film on his corneas leaves his gaze opaque and empty.
“It’s cataracts,” my stepmother tells me later, with a fatalistic shrug.
And when I talk about an operation, she says it’s too late now.
“We would have had to go back to France when it first started,” she says. “We couldn’t, we didn’t have the money. That’s how it is.”
Another shrug, resigned and indifferent, her brown eyes almost as dull as my father’s. She takes next to no notice of Marie. And I’m disappointed that my father can’t make out Marie’s features, having secretly hoped that, finding her so perfectly loveable, he might regret not having raised any of his own daughters, and that this regret might be for him a suffering, an affliction, a thorn lodged in the hide of his egotism. But no, nothing of the sort — to be sure, why come here only to hurt him, but really, what’s the good of coming here only to find nothing and no one in any way changed by my coming? Saying hello to Marie, he pretends to be speaking to her, but it is to a shape with no face and no clear outline that he tosses out two or three formal sentences, in a voice that, given the circumstances, can hardly be full of warmth.
“I hear you’ve gone in for architecture,” I say.
“I designed two or three beautiful houses. But that’s all over now, I got sick of it.”
I will next ask my stepmother:
“Why won’t he admit he can’t see?”
“He’s embarrassed,” she tells me, with the cold indolence that is now hers.
Marie and I are invited to stay for dinner at my father’s. Emerging from various rooms of the house, three or four young men sit down at the table beside us, all of them my father’s children, but all born to different women, none of whom I know. They’re uncomfortable, grim, unsmiling. The house’s dejected atmosphere ends up affecting Marie, who came here so full of sentimental dreams of a reunion, and I see her bury her nose in her plate, of interest to no one, diluted in the flood of descendents.