Who do you take me for? Everyone’s heard about the genocide in Rwanda. Eighty thousand Tutsis cut down to size in next to no time. But although Stephen had contributed to a collective work on the subject without ever having set foot in Kigali, and often discussed it with Deogratias, she avoided the issue out of fear of voyeurism. Moreover, she was unable to conceptualize such a massacre. It was impossible for her to imagine men, women, and children with their heads chopped off, breast-feeding babies sliced in two, fetuses ripped from their mothers’ wombs, and the sickening smell of blood and corpses thrown into the rivers and lakes during the killing spree.
She rubbed her hands with oil and began to massage him.
Very soon, he slipped into a semiconsciousness while she received through her palms his inner turmoil and endeavored to control it. Every time she set about healing wounds, she thought of the two beings she had been unable to relieve. Her mother, whom she adored. During her final years, when she still had enough courage to return to Guadeloupe for the vacations, she took refuge with Aunt Léna at Redoute. When Papa Doudou died, Aunt Léna, who hated her job as a social worker, retired. She dressed in sack cloth, stuck a bakoua hat on her head, and played the role of planter, wearing out the workers in her banana grove. Rose never complained about how seldom her beloved daughter visited her. She no longer went out, not even to take communion at dawn mass. Father Restif, a Breton with blue eyes, gave her the comfort of the Sacrament at home. She now weighed over five hundred pounds and refused to show herself. She inched open the door to let in only three people — Father Restif, the loyal Meynalda, and good doctor Magne. No need to mention that she no longer sang. She performed in public for the last time at the birthday of a great-niece when everybody begged her to sing. Breaking with habit, she had sung in Spanish:
Bésame, bésame mucho,
como si fuera esta noche
la ltima vez.
Some people said that her deformity was the work of one of Elie’s mistresses, a certain Ginéta, whom he had promised to marry and then abandoned with her four little bastards and her two eyes to cry with — at that time they hadn’t invented the expression “single mother.” Most people refused to accept such a commonplace explanation. Abandoning women and children is nothing new under the sun, neither in Guadeloupe nor in the rest of the world. Elie was neither the first nor the last in his category. Yet, as far back as Guadeloupeans could remember, they had never seen such a sickness as the one that was ravaging Rose. They thought rather she was paying for her papa, Ebenezer Charlebois, the most corrupt of all the politicians, who, with the help of a Haitian obeahman and Nigerian dibias, practiced human sacrifice to ensure his reelection. At every All Saints Day, instead of candles, his grave was daubed with a mixture of excrement and tar in revenge; then the word “CUR” written in capital letters evened the score.
Two years before he died, Elie had finally separated from Rose. He kept to his routine, continuing to drink his thirty-year-old Feneteau les Grappes Blanches rum with his friends in the living room before lunch. At half past twelve he was the first at table to devour a plateful of fried fish and lentils cooked in lard by Meynalda. At six in the evening he would join other friends at their meeting place, named the Senate, on the Place de la Victoire. No connection with that of the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. But he had taken up his night quarters in one of the family’s upstairs-downstairs houses on the rue Dugommier. There the bòbò women, not at all intimidated by his eighty years of age, rivaled in ardor and imagination to entertain and satisfy him. Yet Rosélie had no right to throw the first stone, she who was blissfully whiling away her days at the other end of the world with her white guy. Well, blissfully, in a manner of speaking! For the second person to whom she had never been able to offer peace of mind was herself. When you think about it, it’s not surprising. The cancer specialist doesn’t treat his own cancer. Nor the dentist his abscess. She had believed that Stephen would give her that strength of which he had more than enough to spare. Instead, his presence and protection had paradoxically sapped the little confidence she had in herself. Then, suddenly, he had left her on her own. The sly, insidious reproach embittered her heart.
Half conscious, Faustin tossed and turned and moaned. She tightened the pressure of her hands on his forehead and neck, and he relaxed.
In New York they had lived on Riverside Drive, steps away from the university where Stephen worked. An apartment with a view of the river. On the other shore of the Hudson they could see the high-rises of New Jersey, and in the evening, to their right, the luminous steel girders of the George Washington Bridge.
Nevertheless, Rosélie couldn’t help regretting N’Dossou. And all those who had helped her. Dominique, first of all. Dominique, quadroon with a heart of gold, from Cayenne in French Guiana. When you are five thousand miles from home, the overseas departments merge into one. Guadeloupe and Guiana united! Dominique and Rosélie had been seated not far from each other at the annual banquet of the Overseas Départements Association. As a result of her many sentimental misfortunes, there was no love lost between Dominique and black men. She always ended her judgments with the same lethal phrase:
“They’re all filthy machos!”
Not that she liked white men any better. She did not dare ask that question which constantly dances at the back of the eyes and haunts the mind:
“Let’s get straight to the point. Musically speaking, one white half note equals two black quarter notes. Sexually speaking, is one white guy equal to a black?”
Then she would take refuge behind a militant attitude and accuse Rosélie of betrayal. Betrayal? Of what? Rosélie asked angrily.
The Race, of course!
Cut to the quick, Rosélie retorted. She experimented with a weapon that in fact she was rather good at using: irony. So it was the unfortunate Stephen who had dealt in the lucrative traffic of prize slaves? He had been an absentee planter? It must have been he who whispered to Bonaparte to reinstate slavery? Since women always get the blame—cherchez la femme, they say — some had hastily accused the beautiful Creole, Josephine de Beauharnais. The reason why some hotheads had mutilated her statue on the Savane in Fort-de-France in Martinique. A statue with its throat slashed. A sun throat slashed. Celanire, throat slashed. And that’s not all.
Without stopping, Dominique accumulated a thousand reasons for loathing Stephen.
“Too polite to be honest. He’s two-faced, I can sense it. He’s hiding something. And then, he’s too full of himself.”
Stephen, two-faced? On the contrary, he spoke his mind. He poked fun at people, always ready to contradict, mock, and criticize. Rosélie wondered by what miracle she found favor in his eyes. During the early years she used to tremble, like a dunce at an oral exam, convinced the examiner would tire of her. She had waited for that moment for twenty years. In vain. His indulgence and patience had never failed. They had kept her safe and warm, like a premature baby in its incubator.
Then came Tran Anh and Ana. Tran Anh, openhearted but intimidated, didn’t dare manifest his poor French in front of this white university professor and never opened his mouth in his presence. Stephen complained that Ana’s armpits smelled and bluntly called her a whore.
“If she’s a whore, then I am too!” Rosélie protested.
“You,” laughed Stephen, “you’re a saint.”
Under her hands, the nodules, which had represented Faustin’s torment and tension, faded away. His breathing became more relaxed. She couldn’t do any more for a first meeting.