My father holds forth. He pretends to turn his glassy gaze toward each of us in turn. We’re served nothing but a single dish of semolina with vegetable broth, garnished with a small helping of chickpeas. They have no money, I tell myself. They’re stuck here in Burkina, in a neighborhood my proud father would once never even have deigned to drive through, because they have no money and nowhere to go, in spite of my father’s many children on three continents.
And all alone my father talks on, joyless, practiced. He’s wearing a Western suit, well-tailored but not particularly clean. Around him, his children are downcast. Should I rescue my father and stepmother? Should I help them come back to France? And what will they do then? I deeply regret having come here, and I don’t know what to think of this man. I believe I can glimpse one impervious part of him, one sole part unchanged over decades of a disorderly life, which shelters his exclusive love for himself. I don’t know what to think of him. I find him smug and unsympathetic. Can I rescue my father? Can I even offer my aid to this man who always made it a point of honor to put up a prosperous front? And how can I even think of taking on two supplementary souls, my father and my stepmother, so ill-equipped, how can I think of bringing them into my house, of living with them, even temporarily? Would she then cease to be my stepmother and become my dearest friend once again? And those adult children, anxious and sullen, who my father houses under his roof, what would become of them?
My stepmother chews slowly, staring into the distance. My father pontificates, to the indifference of all, and now he’s moved on to Monsieur Urbain — that bastard, as he calls him — and his house.
“This Urbain thinks very highly of you,” I say, overcome with pity for my father.
“If I dared,” he says, “I’d blow up that house of his, and him along with it.”
“The beautiful house you designed?”
“Yes,” says my father. “The hell with art. The bastard never paid me.”
My father then flies into a terrifying rage. His tone stays steady, but his hands shake, his thighs twitch under the table, his entire face is convulsed by tics. The young men who surround him, his late-life offspring, glum and downhearted, the wretched children of his middle age, his bitter age, are staring at the table, slightly hunched in their chairs, as if long accustomed, I tell myself, to taking these defensive measures when the tempest starts to rage. I’ve spent little time in the company of my father, but I’ve always heard, and always seen for myself, that he was a gentle man — stubborn but peaceable, unconciliatory but clement. And here I see violence radiating from his whole skeletal body. He leaps to his feet, toppling his chair.
“If it was just him, that would be one thing,” he says in his flat voice. “But the others are just as bad, they never paid me either. That’s why we live this way, you understand?”
He picks up his plateful of semolina and chickpeas. He throws it through the open window. We hear the plate break in the courtyard. Dumbstruck, Marie lets out a shocked little giggle.
“He does that at almost every meal,” my stepmother whispers. “It’s only an act, just a new way he’s found to keep himself from eating.”
I ask:
“Is it true no one’s paid him?”
“I think it’s only right,” she says. “They pretend to believe he’s an architect, or at least a competent architect, and he pretends to design houses, I mean he draws up blueprints but they don’t make any sense, and then when it’s all done they pretend to pay him. It’s not for real, no one thinks it’s for real. But now your father pretends to believe it’s for real, and after all that time pretending maybe he thinks it’s the truth. Oh, don’t ask me. I’m so sick of it all, so sick of it all,” my stepmother adds, with a sort of weary intensity.
There’s nothing left in her of the girl she used to be — and what about me? I’d have to ask her to find out, but does she remember our friendship, who we were? I’m not sure she does. Through clenched jaws, her teeth bitterly gnashing, she tells me she’s come up with all sorts of projects since she got to Burkina, but thanks to my father — unhelpful, jealous, sometimes poisonously disloyal — they’ve all come to nothing.
“Oh, I can’t stand it anymore,” says my stepmother. “I mean it, I’m tired, tired, I don’t care what happens next. I have no children, I have nothing. He’s got too many children, and I don’t have any. Now I don’t care anymore.”
Evidently my father has resolved to let himself waste away. He pretends to eat, but actually swallows only a few spoonfuls of semolina every day. So my stepmother tells me, in her cold despair. What can I do? They all need saving — the two of them, the young men in their clutches — but who’s supposed to do it? I wish I hadn’t come here, and hadn’t learned of, hadn’t witnessed such a disaster. I also wish Marie had never witnessed or learned of this ugly, glacial ruin, the fruit of my father’s vanity. Marie is a young French girl of her time: understandably, she was hoping for warm feelings and sensitivity. And now she’s discovering an incomprehensible paralysis of the sentiments, a collective indifference and sabotage: the slow agony of a household revolving around a master whose taste for death is no longer kept under wraps.
The next day, the lecture hall is half empty. At the very back, I can see my stepmother, fortunately alone. She’s chatting with Marie, and she sends me a cheerful little wave that warms my heart. And two days later, she’s the one who comes to say goodbye to us at the airport, again alone.
“I’m going to do whatever it takes to get back to France, as soon as I possibly can,” she says. “If your father wants to stay, he can stay.”
I look at her round face, her eyes, wildly aglow with a hope I can’t quite define.
“And what about him, what’ll happen to him?” asks Marie.
“He’s on his way to an early grave,” says my stepmother, defeated.
She then informs me that, having no family left to come home to, when she gets to France she’ll stay with my own mother while she looks for a new job and apartment. I thought my friend had completely lost touch with my mother since our high-school years: I didn’t realize they’ve been writing since the days of the Ledada, regularly exchanging photos and news, in the name of a fidelity to the past and to my father that I have some difficulty understanding. She’s kept up with all my mother’s adventures in Marseille, and so, a little dazed by the oddity of the situation, I ask her:
“Whatever became of the little girl? Bella?”
She tells me that Bella stayed behind in Marseille, with a foster family, that my mother goes down to see her twice a month, that she — my friend, that is — hopes to make the trip with my mother one day, and make Bella’s acquaintance.
“But still. . What’s going to happen to him, all alone here?” Marie asks again.
“You can’t go on loving someone who won’t eat,” my stepmother says, matter-of-factly.
We hugged her, then hugged her again, and we walked off toward the departure lounge, looking back over our shoulders now and then to see her petrified silhouette growing smaller and smaller, standing stock still on the concourse, as if she had only to stay there unmoving for a few days or weeks to finally end up on an airplane, all her problems miraculously solved behind her back, by the sheer force of her mineral inertia.
I still don’t know if my friend, if my stepmother has come back to France, and I don’t know who’s putting her up. I dream that one morning, perhaps, in fifteen years, or twenty, I’ll hear the little bell on my gate ringing, and before me I’ll see a small dark-haired girl who’ll say to me: “I’m your half-sister Bella,” in a timid, tremulous voice, with an echo of something green in it — just as her eyes will be green, and green her sweater and her trousers, so that none of this ever comes to an end.