“That’s all for today,” she said.
Then, as he glanced around him somewhat dejectedly, she added convincingly:
“Tonight you will sleep, believe me.”
He sat up, and holding one of her hands between his palms, he asked:
“When will I see you again?”
His tone of voice was so urgent it was almost as if he were asking for a date. But that’s how attached patients get to those who treat them. She pressed down on his neck for a last time.
“Next Friday. But I’m not coming back here. Mitchell Plains is too dangerous. Where do you live? Would you like me to come to your place? I can treat you at home.”
He shook his head.
“I have no home. I’m living with friends.”
He stared at her like a small boy who is burying the last of his family.
“Then come to my place,” she offered. “The police regularly patrol the neighborhood.”
They had done so ever since Stephen’s murder. Every cloud has a silver lining. He made a face and began to get dressed.
“Does that prove it’s less dangerous? The police work hand in hand with the crooks. They’re as corrupt as they are in America. My God, who could have imagined that post-apartheid South Africa would become such a jungle?”
Rosélie refrained from making any comment; she refused to judge, condemn, or question.
In the ensuing silence, he continued:
“Why do you stay here? I mean why don’t you go home? This is no place for a woman on her own.”
What place on earth is made for a woman on her own?
Tell me so that I can take refuge with my sisters, abandoned like myself. We’ll form a sisterhood of Amazons with neither bow nor arrow. In that way we’ll keep our right breasts.
No doubt about it, without even knowing him, Manuel must have passed the word on. She began the usual explanation. For her, South Africa was not merely a political concept: the former country of apartheid, the former white bastion of southern Africa. Or a new El Dorado, a paradise for the enterprising. She was intimately linked to it, for here was the grave where a loved one lay.
He interrupted her and said disparagingly:
“I know. Dido told me the whole story…a white guy.”
It was as if he had slapped her full in the face. She staggered from the force of the blow, then turned her back on him.
“That’ll be eight hundred rand,” she said, trying to calm down.
Money was no problem for him, that was obvious. Without a word of protest, he held out a handful of banknotes. She counted them ostentatiously, then headed toward the door with a curt thank-you. He ran after her and grabbed her sleeve, murmuring, embarrassed, like a child:
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
What were you trying to do, then? But hurt me you never will. Not now! I’m used to it, you know.
Since she still didn’t respond, he repeated his question.
“Will I see you again?”
Why not? Your money doesn’t have the color of your prejudice.
“I told you, on Friday,” she said with a nod of the head.
Then she preceded him into the living room, where Dido was glued to the TV, watching Keanu Reeves, who was so like her dead son, she said. She reluctantly turned round and asked:
“How did it go?”
She sounded like a madam inquiring of one of her girls how it went taking the virginity of a young boy. Neither one responded. Without a word, the two women accompanied Faustin to the front gate. The Mercedes had now drawn up along the sidewalk. A hefty bodyguard, openly holding a gun, dashed to open the door and Faustin dived into the back. The car noisily drove back up the silent street, everyone holed up in his house with his fears. The only signs of life were a pack of dogs under a streetlamp, fighting over a garbage can.
The two women went back inside.
For safety reasons Rosélie did not go back to Faure Street. She stayed and had dinner at Dido’s, then slept in the small room she had just used for her consultation.
Faustin’s brutality had accentuated her moroseness. Day after day, under every sky, under every latitude, so much incomprehension! So many insults! So many snubs! She compared her life to one of those quilts she had bought during a visit to Amish country in Pennsylvania: a mosaic of different textures of a slightly dull coloring. Brown cotton: the years in N’Dossou; gray wooclass="underline" the days in New York; mauve felt: life in Cape Town; and black velvet since the death of Stephen.
The only exception, the scarlet silk of the stay in Japan.
From the outset, New York had terrified her: its vastness, its shrillness, and its medley of colors. No skin had the same color. No voice the same accent. Which one was the New Yorker? The African? The Indian? The Arab? The Jew? The fair-haired WASP? All swam with the same ease in the aquarium of the city. The English language did not reign supreme. Spanish collided with Yiddish, Serbo-Croat, Urdu — and all this Babel composed an indescribable cacophony. She began by holing herself up for three months in the depths of her apartment. To the point where she aroused the compassion of Linda, the Peruvian cleaning lady, who thought she was sick and as a result forgot about her husband not having a green card and the worry it was causing. Every morning she would bring her native remedies of leaves, roots, worms, and insect larvae that she bought in a botánica on Amsterdam Avenue, run by a Puerto Rican they called Pepo the Magician. Touched by her thoughtfulness, Rosélie stoically drank these vile concoctions. To her surprise they ended up having an effect. One day she woke up cured.
That night at Dido’s she fell asleep amid the forgotten din of ambulance sirens, the screams of police cars, and the barking of fire trucks. In Times Square, above the idling crowds, the neon signs raped the darkness.
I am in a New York state of mind.
FIVE
Every time Rosélie spent the night at Dido’s, not only did Dido keep her awake until the early hours of the morning, harping on life’s misfortunes — Amishand and his coronary thrombosis, Manil and AIDS, and the Jaipur restaurant, gone with its reputation for good food — but she also woke her up a few hours later to comment on the Cape Tribune and other national dailies.
That morning, the news of a dark, horrific event was spread across the front page.
A woman was accused of murdering her husband, who had been missing for several weeks. According to her son-inlaw, who had become suspicious of the meat packed in plastic bags on the refrigerator shelves, she had cut him up into little pieces and frozen them. Why would be anybody’s guess.
While Dido lamented on the state of barbarity in which the country had fallen, Rosélie was fascinated by the photo of this Fiela.
Around fifty. No more diabolical-looking than any other. She even looked quite gentle, almost shy. As thin as a smoked herring, which emphasized her angular features. The only thing that stood out were her eyes. Despite the poor quality of the photo, you couldn’t help looking at them. Elongated, they stretched up toward her temples, eyelids drooping like blinkers through which gleamed her pupils.
She’s my age. She’s not beautiful. She could be me.
The husband, the victim, was tall and thin with a pleasant face. Not ugly. Rather attractive. With a rounded forehead under a skullcap of peppercorn hair, and an intriguing smile.
Rosélie remembered a case that had made headlines while she was living in Paris. A Japanese student had murdered a twenty-one-year-old Dutch student. He had raped her dead body, cut it up, and eaten several pieces. Declared insane, he had been extradited to Japan.