Everyone looked at one another in embarrassment. Wasn’t it precisely these sorts of clichés they were fighting against? The love of a white man for a black woman is not simply a quest for exoticism or the urgent desire for an orgasm. Let us replace the words “erection,” “blow job,” and “orgasm” with “tenderness,” “communication,” and “respect.”
Inevitably the operation “Art for the People” was shelved. The morning after Bebe’s reception, Stephen, now sober, recalled the mediocrity of her poems and exclaimed he had no intention of working with her. As a regular client of the girls at the Green Dolphin, Arthur contracted the clap and went straight home to London for a cure. Worse, Piotr broke up with Bebe for a model from Eritrea who had been on the cover of Vogue. But Bebe soon dried her tears. Hardly had he emptied his closets than she moved in the personal belongings of an Australian tennis player, seeded thirtieth internationally but, in the opinion of his coach, destined for stardom.
This repeat performance of a mixed couple so enraged her detractors that they dared to write in a literary journal for the first time that her poetry was a load of crap.
FOUR
Once Simone was gone, Rosélie only had Dido.
As a Cape coloured, Dido had not experienced all the savagery of apartheid. She was born in Lievland, about twelve miles from Stellenbosch, in a picture-perfect landscape of rugged mountains, jagged-edged against an unchanging blue sky. A mass of flowers. Covered with the curly mop of vineyards. Her family descended from slaves from Madagascar come to work in the vineyards, which the de Louw family had purchased from a French Huguenot.
Nothing really justified Dido’s familiarity with Stephen and Rosélie. Nevertheless she would say “us,” meaning “us French,” referring to the trio they formed, because in even Dido’s eyes, though the color of their skin was identical, Rosélie had nothing in common with the South African kaffirs who had been excluded from working in the vineyards and dumped farther and farther from the white world she had learned to hate and despise. Since the words “Guadeloupe, overseas département” meant no more to Dido than to the rest of the world, she considered Rosélie to be French. Didn’t she speak French to perfection? Hadn’t she studied in Paris? Didn’t she eat her steak raw and her Camembert runny? Dido, who had a mind of her own and was not afraid to speak it, would gladly contradict her.
“You, you see racism everywhere! That’s not racism. It’s because you’re a woman they treat you like that. Women — black, white, yellow, or coloured — they’re the asshole of the world!”
Stephen’s version:
“Not everything can be attributed to racism. A lot of things are due to your individual attitude.”
Whatever.
Although apartheid had spared Dido to a certain degree, life had had no consideration for her. She had first landed herself a good match in the shape of Amishand, an Indian. The couple opened a restaurant named Jaipur, which soon made an excellent name for itself. With their earnings they had built a house in Mitchell Plains, the coloured district. If you didn’t meddle in politics — the right to vote, to education, to health benefits, to justice for all, and other such nonsense — life in South Africa could be sweet. Amishand was saving up to realize his dream of ending his days in India at Varanasi. If he was going to go up in flames, it might as well be on the shore of the Ganges. His relatives would scatter his ashes in the waters of the sacred river close by, and he would only have to make one small heavenly step to reach nirvana. His bank account was flourishing when coronary thrombosis dealt a deadly blow. From one day to the next Dido had become the Widow Perchaud, mother of Manil, a seven-year-old son she had killed herself raising in the memory of his deserving father. Alas, the beloved Manil had been the dagger that pierced her heart. Drink, women, men, and drugs! She had ruined herself paying off his debts, then was forced to mortgage and finally sell the Jaipur, that jewel of Indian gastronomy. She had reached the depth of degradation when she had had to hire herself out as a cook by the month. Fortunately, in her misfortune, she had met Rosélie, to whom she had grown attached, like family.
After Manil had died from AIDS, Dido lost the desire to live. She had been overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt. All that had been her fault. She had treated her son like a treasure she took pride in, like a bracelet to flaunt, like a necklace clasped to her neck. She hadn’t loved him for what he was. Neither her prayers to the God of the Christians nor her sacrifices to the Hindu deities could bring peace back to her heart. Only Rosélie had managed to do that. Through the laying on of hands and locating the pressure points of Dido’s pain.
The car disappeared into the night. Rosélie remained standing on the sidewalk littered with garbage. She had been lucky a taxi had accepted to take her to her appointment at Dido’s. Once the sun had gone down, no taxi driver ventured into the black townships: Langa, Nyanga, Guguletu, Khayelitsha, forbidden zones! And even Mitchell Plains, once a calm, hardworking district, was now eaten up with the wrath and fury of gang warfare.
Rosélie looked left and right like a cautious schoolgirl, then ran across the sinister, ill-lit street.
Just as she was furiously battling with fate, so Dido was fighting to make her surroundings a little more human. She was the president of an association that refused to let Mitchell Plains become like the hell of so many other neighborhoods. In her little garden she had planted not only the inevitable bougainvillea, but also hibiscus, azaleas, crotons, and magnificent orchids: green-spotted lady’s slippers. She had even managed to grow a blue palm that was covered with ivory-colored buds, as bright as candles on a Christmas tree. She hurried to open the door and whispered:
“Look! That’s his car over there.”
It was obvious she was taking great delight in the mystery.
Rosélie turned her head and saw a Mercedes huddled in the shadows, its sidelights glowing in the dark like the eyes of a drunkard. Dido led her inside. The living room was like the garden. You never saw such a jumble! Too much heavy furniture: sofas overstuffed with cushions patterned with flowers, triangles, and rosettes; armchairs with round, square, and rectangle lace macassars; pouffes; pedestal tables; and glass and lacquered coffee tables jostled one another on flowery rugs. Under the reproduction of a group of apsaras draped in yellow there sat a man dressed in an alpaca safari jacket. So motionless you thought he was asleep. But when the two women went over to him, he immediately opened his eyes, whose flash was so piercing, that’s all you could see in his face. He stood up. He was slim, well built, but disappointingly small. Much smaller than Rosélie and her five feet ten inches. She had always been as lanky as a pole, the tallest in her class, sitting in the back row. Such a look would have better suited someone of another stature. Once Dido had led them into the guest room, as cluttered as the living room, with walls plastered with an array of prints, such as Ganesh with his monstrous trunk, monkey-headed Hanuman, and the handsome bearded face of Jesus Christ, our Savior, he asked abruptly, betraying his embarrassment:
“What do I do?”
“Nothing!” Rosélie smiled. “Just relax!”
She lit the incense and candles. Then she helped him take off his safari jacket and undervest, he resisting a little the intimacy of such gestures. She made him lie down on the sofa bed, laid her hands on his head and ran them over his warm shoulders. He closed his eyes.
“Dido tells me you can’t sleep,” she said softly.
“I don’t think I’ve slept since 1994. Night after night I stuff myself with sleeping pills. So I get thirty minutes or an hour’s sleep. You know what happened in our country?”