Read all about it in The Tale of the Mulatto Girl, the memoirs of Jane Johnson, whose mother hired her out at the age of fifteen and who bore ten mulatto bastards! She never got her freedom. Her master loved her too much to lose her.
Rosélie’s behavior was no less shocking.
Unfortunately, Papa Koumbaya, whom they had called on his cell phone, another of his sons’ generous gifts, was partying in Nyanga. Since he could never refuse her anything, he promised to be there as soon as he could.
He turned up around midnight, somewhat tipsy, and provoked the ire of Dido, who could already see the Thunderbird in a ditch. But the journey back went off without a hitch.
The moon, so round it could have been drawn with a pair of compasses, illuminated every corner of the sky, which the wind, still blowing briskly, had washed clean of the tiniest cloud. Its rays lit up the tangled mop of oaks, the farms huddled among the vineyards, the ribbon of the road, and then the ocean, the ocean dressed in amethyst, untamed, slipping farther and farther away, as far as the eye could see. Never had Rosélie felt so alone. Never had she struggled so much with a feeling of bitterness toward Stephen. He had brought her to this loathsome country against her will and then abandoned her here.
Back at Faure Street, draped in his dark brown quilted blanket, Deogratias was already asleep, lying at the foot of the traveler’s tree.
SEVEN
Rosélie, who didn’t have Dido’s culinary talents, was finishing a meager meal when the bell at the front gate rang. Slightly alarmed, she sat up. Who could that possibly be? She wasn’t expecting anyone, since she had no friends and therefore no visitors. In some neighborhoods the gangs worked brazenly in broad daylight. Fake movers would empty a house from the cellar to the attic, then neatly liquidate the owners. But they wouldn’t ring to announce their arrival, she reasoned.
She cautiously approached, and was so amazed when she saw him standing on the sidewalk, his face pressed up against the gate like an Arab hawking rugs, that she lost all sense of civility and shouted at him:
“What are you doing here? I don’t work on Sundays.”
He smiled, by no means deterred.
“It’s not that. I wanted to see you, Rosélie.”
He had called her by her name. Even worse, however, no sooner had he said it than she realized the wish was mutual. These past days, this incongruous, inadmissible desire had lain hidden behind the bitterness, the grief, and the anxiety of daily routine. Her fingers, turned strangely numb, finally managed to find the key. She stepped aside to let him in and pointed to the chairs in the garden.
“Shall we sit outside?”
But he preferred to go in. Inside, while he looked her over with a critical eye, she was angry with herself for wearing a battered pair of corduroy trousers, a sweater with holes at the elbows, and no makeup. What man in his right senses could possibly be interested in her?
“You shouldn’t stay locked up at home in this fine weather,” he remarked. “Look at that sun! You ought to get out and—”
“—and enjoy myself, thank you, I’ve done that,” she said, finishing his sentence in a gloomy mocking tone of voice.
She stood powerless while he seized her hand and covered it with kisses.
“Forgive me once again for last time. I don’t know what came over me, I had the urge to hurt you. I suppose I was jealous.”
Hold on! Where is this leading us?
In order to conduct an extramarital affair with all the lies, pretense, and hypocrisy it entails, you need a morale of iron that Rosélie didn’t have. After drifting into troubled waters, sinking, and almost drowning during her terrifying days, at night she liked to come back to the firm, reassuring pontoon of Stephen’s body anchored in the same place. Lovemaking was no longer a physical, bodily struggle from which they emerged exhausted and sweating. It was a pleasant, uneventful stroll in a familiar garden. Afterward, Stephen would uncork a bottle of Italian white wine, Lacrima Christi, read comic strips out loud, and dream of Yeats. Beneath her closed eyelids she could see Rose again, even hear her:
Amado mío,
Love me forever
And let forever begin tonight.
In twenty years she had had only one affair, only one, and the memory of it tucked away, far away, in the corner of her mind, had lost all reality. Had she really lived the madness of those days? Yet, three months after the death of her companion, here was a man whom she didn’t know from Adam, a man she dominated by at least six inches, who was turning her on. She was not proud of it. At the same time, she was deeply distraught, experiencing such sensations and feelings, so long forgotten that she thought she had never felt them. Her life was not over, then?
“Let me take you out to Clifton,” he proposed. “I know a place where they serve mussels and Mort Subite beer. It’s just like being in Brussels.”
If it was just to have a drink, she had gallons of white wine. Every week Dido brought back crates from Lievland. In the kitchen she almost broke two glasses and cut herself opening a bottle, she was so nervous. When she came back into the living room he was standing in front of one of her paintings. Turning round, he asked her the inevitable question.
“What does that represent?”
She smiled. “Whatever you like.”
He seemed disconcerted, repeating:
“Whatever I like?”
Then he laughed, revealing his uneven, square teeth. He came toward her, took both glasses from her hands, and set them down on a piece of furniture, as if he had wasted enough time with words, gestures, and smiles and now needed to get down to essentials. They made love with the frenzy of two high school students on the living room’s dark red sofa.
Afterward, Rosélie was shattered. Years of fidelity wiped out in a single morning! Her fidelity had nothing binding about it. Stephen had never presented her with a parchment to sign:
Commandment No. 10: “Thou shalt covet no one but me.” It was the fruit of a personal decision.
He jumped up, for, like Stephen, he seemed to possess that quality that was so cruelly lacking in her: he was at ease with himself, satisfied at being who he was.
“Get dressed!” he ordered with the authority conferred on him by the pleasure he had just given her. “I’m taking you to a club in the Malay district where they play music from Zaire.”
“Music from Zaire?” she said, pulling a face.
“Well, from the Congo, since Zaire no longer exists.”
Seeing little enthusiasm, he smiled.
“You must reintegrate; you’ve lived too long among white folk.”
But this time he was joking.
Rosélie had been sleeping like she hadn’t slept for three months when Dido entered with her tray and aroma of coffee. It was late. The sun’s rays had filtered into the very middle of the bedroom. Dido had travestied herself as a domestic — headscarf, colorless blouse — but as usual sat down intimately on the bed as if she were at home. That morning she made no comments about the newspapers and announced in an excited voice:
“I have to go back to Lievland. Sofie called. Jan has just died.”
But Rosélie no longer had time for Jan. She recounted the night’s events. Dido listened without interrupting and first of all said by way of conclusion:
“It’s done you a world of good. You were able to sleep. You look ten years younger.”
But her approval was short-lived. She went and fetched a sheet of paper and sat down in front of the chest of drawers.
“Now let’s see what type of person he is,” she said severely.