With Dido still lamenting, this time about her knees swollen with osteoarthritis and the corns on her feet that had kept her awake all night, they made their way to the bus stop. In daylight Mitchell Plains seemed less sinister. Behind the hedges topped with barbed wire, the houses were pretty and the yards filled with flowers. The pattern of avenues had a certain harmony to them. The old wreck of a bus, repainted in orange to give it a new look, skirted the airport and rattled through the ring of shantytowns. As a rule, Rosélie found the sight harrowing. At the Liberty IV bus stop a woman with braided hair plastered with red mud like a Masai, was sitting on the street, surrounded by her rags and her hollow-eyed triplets. Who could have fathered them? Imagining this monstrous coupling made you shiver. The passengers threw coins into her lap to ward off the evil spells she was bound to make. That morning Rosélie took no notice, her only thoughts were for the mysterious Fiela.
Now facing Table Mountain, the indefatigable jailer, the bus crawled toward the center. Soon, it filled with men and women muffled up in harshly colored acrylic shawls and sweaters. For although a deceptive sun shone in the midst of a blue-lacquered sky, the wind, that pitiless wind that twisted the pines to its liking, tore at the lips until they bled, and seeped in just about everywhere. Rosélie had never got used to these European-style clothes, these crowds “so swayed from their own cry,” who seemed to have lost their joie de vivre, together with their finery. Away with clichés! “We are the people of dance,” claimed Senghor. “Zouk-la, sé sel médikamen nou ni,” shouted Kassav as an echo. Nothing is more debatable. Nevertheless, in N’Dossou distress didn’t grab you by the throat as it did in Cape Town. It adorned itself with the shimmering colors of boubous and head ties. It seemed ethereal, light, echoing with the rhythms of obaka dancing.
The bus entered the city and stopped amid the confusion of Grand Parade: tourists hurrying toward the massive hulk of the Castle, the former administrative center, passing market sellers crying out their wares of cheap clothes and spices from Madagascar and the Indian Ocean — peppers, saffron, cardamom, and cumin — others advertising their South African oranges, potbellied as grapefruit, grapes swollen with mauve juice, and apples with varnished scarlet cheeks. Here Cape Town was embellished by the disorder and colors of an African city. However, on reaching the residential suburbs, they gradually vanished. It became rectilinear, cold, immaculate, a poisonous flower growing at the extreme tip of the black continent.
Leaving Dido, Rosélie made her way to the central police station along Strand Street, an austere building where, previously, political prisoners were kept while waiting to be allocated to other jails in the province. She walked along endless corridors leading to sparsely lit rooms where black and white police officers were interrogating the accused with the same brutality. The latter were uniformly black, on this point nothing had changed. Crime knows no age. Old men who looked too old to concoct a crime rubbed shoulders with adolescents who looked too juvenile to try. In a cubicle a group of children who couldn’t have been more than twelve years old were crying hot tears while they waited.
The Inspector was scribbling in his cramped office, whose space was being eaten up by huge metal filing cabinets. On the wall hung the photo that had gone round the world: Nelson Mandela, smiling beside Winnie, as he walked out of prison victorious.
Inspector Lewis Sithole was no taller than a fourteen-year-old. Puny-looking, he wore a khaki uniform that was too big for him. An arid forest of overly long hair formed a halo around his head, on which was perched a baseball cap. His beard, however, was sparse. Inspector Lewis Sithole was not a handsome man.
On seeing Rosélie he jumped to his feet and hurriedly proposed they go out. They would be better off outside. Did she mind walking? They could walk as far as the Camelia, that café on Heritage Square.
At the corner of the street, two white men, two homeless derelicts, their pink skin blackened with filth, were sprawled on a bed of packing paper. They stared at Lewis and Rosélie with threatening looks, as if they held them personally responsible for their tumble from the top to the bottom of the social ladder. That summed up Cape Town! That hostility of the whites which poisoned the air like a miasma. This feeling of danger which could sweep down from anywhere. However hard the authorities over there in Pretoria reveled in big speeches about the duty of forgiveness, the need to live together, Truth and Reconciliation, there was nothing but tension, hatred, and desire for revenge in this patch of land. At the Camelia, once the coloured waitress, coloured and crestfallen, had taken their order, Lewis inquired about Stephen’s cell phone.
To tell the truth, she hadn’t looked for it, not understanding really what he hoped to find in it.
Armed with patience, he explained to her that cell phones can store the last ten numbers called. This way, they could find out who had called Stephen.
Rosélie shrugged her shoulders. Provided someone had called him!
Lewis Sithole leaned over, so close she could feel his warm breath. No man in his right mind would walk around the center of Cape Town unarmed past midnight. She persisted: Stephen had an excellent reason for going out. He wanted some cigarettes, for God’s sake!
Stephen refused to be intimidated by violence. He had even elaborated a theory on the subject and had no intention of behaving differently whatever the circumstances. In New York he would walk around the Bronx in the middle of the night. In London he didn’t let himself be intimidated by dangerous neighborhoods. In Paris he would prowl around the Sentier district at any time of the day or night.
“If he wanted cigarettes,” Lewis Sithole continued with the same air of patience, “he would have sent the watchman. At least he had his spear to defend himself.”
“Deogratias sleeps like a log,” retorted Rosélie. “Sometimes we can hear him snoring from our bedroom under the roof. That particular night, he didn’t even hear Stephen go out.”
“Yet the watchman at a neighbor’s house saw him walk past. He says he seemed to be in a hurry. Almost running. Where do you think he was going?”
To the Pick ’n Pay.
Stephen always walked briskly. Especially after midnight, when there was not a soul about and it was five degrees Celsius.
She relived with the same spasm of pain that moment when her life had been turned upside down and plunged her into solitude and fear. It was a group of young partygoers coming out of a fish restaurant on Kloof Street who had alerted the police. The latter had taken their time. They had taken over an hour to arrive at the crime scene and drive the victim to the hospital. There he had continued to bleed in a so-called emergency room. In the morning the hospital had called Rosélie, who was sick with worry, for Stephen never spent the night away from home. He knew she worried when he was away for too long, even during the daytime.
“What would you do if I worked at the other end of town until goodness knows what hour?” he complained.
Yet, beneath the reproach, she sensed he was pleased with his power.
She had spent an unpleasant fifteen minutes with the learned assembly of physicians and interns. They had lowered their masks, and above the squares of white gauze, they bored into her with their multicolored eyes. A real police interrogation.
You really want us to believe that you are the closest living relative? What relation are you to him? You, his wife? What perverse and degenerate tastes had this handsome Englishman? Where is his mother? His father? His sister? There’s nobody else but you? Where are you from in Africa? Guadeloupe? Where’s that? Why did you come to Cape Town? What do you do here? You, a painter? A Kaffir, a painter? And what next?