“To give him some basics. He massacres the English language and thinks his grammatical mistakes are poetic license.”
Mrs. Hillster considered him a genius, pinning his poems to the shop walls, and treated him like a son and an exotic curio. But it so happened that one lunchtime while he was out, two masked boys stormed in and, brandishing a sawed-off shotgun, emptied the contents of a safe stuffed with rand, pounds sterling, and dollars that Mrs. Hillster kept in the shop out of her distrust of banks. For good measure, they had given the poor woman a thorough beating when she tried to intervene. They hadn’t broken into the safe, so Bishupal, who knew both its contents and combination, was assumed to be an obvious accomplice. The police had therefore arrested him. But they were unable to prove a thing. Witnesses had seen him at the time these sad events had come to pass with his nose in As I Lay Dying, sitting at a table in the Pizzeria Napoletana. On her hospital bed, despite a jaw out of joint, broken ribs, and contusions, Mrs. Hillster swore he was innocent. According to her, Bishupal wouldn’t hurt a fly. This incident had occurred a few days after Stephen’s death, at a time when Rosélie had only her own misfortunes on her mind. To make a donation, even belatedly, of over two hundred CDs would be an excellent way of begging forgiveness.
She sat down behind the desk and stared at the murky eye of the computer. There was something troubling to the thought that now that Stephen was gone, the computer stored everything that had preoccupied him. All she need do to penetrate this artificial brain was press a few keys. Yet this would be a sacrilege. Without hesitating, she decided to destroy its memory and then donate the computer, a shell drained of its substance, to the Steve Biko High School. During the funeral a delegation of students and teachers had carried a wreath. Chris Nkosi, who had played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, had read in tears one of his own poems. Without thinking, she tried to open the drawers. Locked except for two of them. The first was filled with those odds and ends you accumulate throughout life: business cards for people you will never do business with, blue erasable Waterman cartridges, matchbooks advertising Café Milano, Café Lalo, Café Mozart, felt-tip pens of every color, staplers without staples, and a small Chinese compass pointing feverishly toward the northeast. There was nothing worth keeping. Rosélie pulled the wastepaper basket toward her, and it was then she saw it, the cell phone they thought was lost. Nestling against one of the desk’s legs, half hidden under the jute rug. A tiny, very expensive object, just a few inches wide, folded into its black leather case. She flipped it open and pressed a key and it lit up, evil-looking and green, like an emerald in the palm of her hand.
It’s Inspector Lewis Sithole who will be happy.
In the other drawer there was a pile of photo albums. She opened one haphazardly. On the first page four people were smiling at the camera. Or rather three people were smiling at the camera, she was standing to one side, aloof and sulky. She turned the photo over: Lone Pine—1994—With Lisa and Richard — Memorable Stay. Stephen had underlined the last two words. The memorable stay fluttered, at first vague and uncertain in her memory, then settled motionless. She remembered. They had taken advantage of one of Stephen’s leaves to visit Death Valley in California. After driving for several hours, they had arrived at a small town whose name foreshadowed what it had to offer. Lone Pine. A few houses huddled along a main street. A fast-food restaurant where individuals with faces of America’s most wanted were swallowing platefuls of carbohydrates. A gas station where enormous trucks had come to a halt. Around a trailer park garlands of jeans, checkered shirts, and children’s sleepsuits were fluttering in the breeze. All the moroseness of Middle America was gathered there. Plus something else, something frightening. It was as if the bestiality of the inhabitants hidden behind these commonplace facades, like an ogre in his lair, would pounce at the slightest pretext. The guidebook had graced the Beaver Inn with three stars even so. Going down to join Stephen at the bar, she saw him in deep conversation with a couple. Around forty. The woman: blond, smartly dressed, and pretty. The man: slightly overfed, a mop of hair, and a pleasant face. As she walked over, they watched her behind their what-a-wonderful-world smiles, switched on for the occasion, with a mixture of aloofness and anxiety. What was this black woman doing walking straight toward them? She reached the table, and it was then that Stephen introduced her, drawing her close with a possessive hug.
“My wife, Rosélie.”
Every time, he never failed! She complained he was playing the conjurer pulling a lugubrious and surprising object out of his hat. In front of his colleagues, his acquaintances, the neighborhood shopkeepers, the newspaper seller, the cigarette merchant, and the florist. She would force a muttered greeting. Every time, the other person would strain their ears, on high alert. In her mouth the French accent that conjured up pell-mell Gay Paree, Chanel suits, Christian Dior, Must de Cartier, and the white lace of the French cancan sounded like an insufferable parody.
You mean to say you’re French?
Oh no! I’m from Guadeloupe!
Where’s that?
My God, what a mix-up!
She suspected Stephen of reveling in the reactions his introduction produced. Remembering them in bed was his life buoy against their sexual shipwreck. Clinging to these memories gave a kick to an exercise that in the long run could have ended up as a routine and endowed it with a taste for the taboo, even perversity or vice.
Lisa and Richard stood up like robots and awkwardly held out their hands.
The unexpected thing about America is that you can live there for years without meeting the natives. Nor even speaking their language. Rosélie had ended up learning English, but not without difficulty. But since she didn’t have an outside job, the only Americans she knew were Stephen’s colleagues. When they came for dinner at Riverside Drive, their conversation revolved around literature or politics, subjects that were foreign to her.
“What are you interested in?” Stephen would ask mockingly after every one of those dinners. “Next time we’ll do our best to please you.”
What am I interested in? Me, me, nothing but me.
In fact, besides Linda, the only people she spoke to were the day porter, a Pakistani in a dark blue uniform; the night porter, a Bulgarian in a brown uniform; and the security patrolmen in their light blue uniforms with gilded facings, swaggering along the neighborhood streets, all of them Latinos.
Lisa and Richard went far beyond her wildest imagination. Richard was a lawyer. Lisa worked for a television station. They were parents of three sons. Both divorced, they each had three daughters from their previous marriages. They didn’t spare one detail recounting their first marriages, the tribulations of their divorces, the trouble with their parents, their quarrels with their in-laws, the problems with their children, their rivalry with brothers and sisters, their marital difficulties, their sexual boredom, the failed orgies, the successful affairs, and their futile sessions with their shrink, who, nevertheless, had cured Hillary Clinton of her depression. This outpouring was especially painful, as it was directed solely at Stephen. Products of centuries of racism and exclusion of blacks, Lisa and Richard were incapable of looking at Rosélie in the eye and treating her like any other human being. At the most they managed to grimace an inane smile, by half turning in her direction. In fact, Rosélie, used to invisibility, could have put up with it if she had been deaf as well. On day four, while Lisa and Richard were giving endless descriptions of their trip to Tuscany and their futile efforts to get the dark, curly-haired Italian gardener into bed with them, she couldn’t take it any longer and fled. A taxi drove her to the Los Angeles Sheraton, from where she called Stephen. He soon joined her. She was waiting for him with some very precise questions. What enjoyment did he get from such company? Did he care about the ordeal it meant for her? Instead of giving an answer, he made love to her with unusual violence, gagging her with kisses.