“You don’t know how to have fun,” he complained yet again.
Have fun? Was that having fun? They didn’t share the same sense of humor.
Back in New York, Stephen invited Lisa and Richard to one of his dinners. But at the last minute they canceled with a lame excuse and were never seen again.
Rosélie also gathered enough strength to climb up to her studio, open the windows, and gaze at her paintings. Since Stephen had gone she hadn’t touched her brushes. Since the officiant was no longer there for the naming ceremonies, she no longer gave birth.
Oddly enough, in Cape Town she had sold a fair number of paintings. All it took was for Mrs. Hillster, while on a visit to her studio in the company of Stephen, now the official guide, to enthuse over Devils, She-Devils, and Zombies and buy it for her shop; as a result, a number of customers had made the detour to Faure Street to be the first to own a painting by this genius, who was still totally unknown but destined in the more or less long term for the spotlight of celebrity, as Mrs. Hillster declared, duly coached. Since South Africa was a cauldron where all the world’s nationalities were cooking, the Germans, Norwegians, Swiss, Indians, and the Mexicans, who remarked learnedly on the similarities with their very own Frida Kahlo — the blood, the entrails, the physical suffering — left with their treasures under their arm, looking very pleased with themselves.
Dido thought along the same lines as Simone.
“You know Bebe Sephuma. Couldn’t she give a helping hand? That’s what you need!”
How could she explain that Bebe Sephuma was not interested in her? Not glamorous enough for a magazine cover! Too awkward and self-conscious! And then she wasn’t English-speaking. People who speak English feel a deep contempt for the rest of the world. The time is long gone when French was considered the language of culture. For serious minds it now seems nothing more than frivolous gibberish.
Once again she was seized with doubt. What were the fruits of her labor worth? As long as she was busy choosing, then mixing the colors, applying the paint with long or short brush strokes, savoring its vivifying smell, her eyes were fixed on this white square of canvas that her imagination slowly peopled and transformed. She heard nothing except for the hum of the outside world that mellowed inside her. She was inhabited by a happiness, no doubt comparable with that of a woman whose fetus moves in the very depths of her flesh. However, once she had lost her waters and given birth, she detached herself from her creation. Worse, she took a sudden dislike to it, like a cruel mother who dreams of throwing her newborn in a garbage dump, wrapped in a plastic bag. So why did she go on painting? Because she couldn’t do otherwise.
But God in his mysterious ways had perhaps put an end to her agony. Now that Stephen was gone, she was no longer anything at all. A masseuse, a medium, a curandera, call it what you like.
“Rosélie Thibaudin, healer of incurable cases.”
At the same time, illogically, the loss of her gift was destroying her.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.
EIGHT
Change your man and you change your rhythm of life.
With Stephen, Rosélie always played the same musical score. Allegro ma non troppo. She spent her days practically alone. As early as seven in the morning he would leave for the university with a colleague and neighbor, a Virginia Woolf specialist, author of a remarkable study on Mrs. Dalloway. In his absence she painted without taking note of the passing hours. Around one o’clock Dido called her from the bottom of the stairs, and Rosélie interrupted her work to watch her eat a usually copious lunch. Dido had what they call a hearty appetite. She spiced her meals with comments on the harshness of women’s condition, the chaos of the world in general, and South Africa in particular, which didn’t prevent her from eating up greedily and scraping her plate. Rosélie always felt slightly envious in front of this ravenous mouth and its masticating teeth. After a few cups of coffee on the patio, she went back up to her studio while Dido returned to the kitchen, where she noisily loaded the antediluvian dishwasher, bought secondhand at a university sale. Then she went and ironed in the living room while listening to Hugh Masekela. The music whirled, wafted up two flights of stairs, and joined Rosélie under the roof. Listening to it, in spite of herself, she ended up knowing every tune like she used to know her father’s Afro-Cuban melodies, Rose’s love songs, and Salama Salama’s reggae music, and she caught herself humming them.
The end of the afternoon brightened up when Stephen came home in another colleague’s car, this time a Chaucer specialist. Then tea at the Mount Nelson followed by dinner in a restaurant along the seafront. Always the same one, not because of the food — the fries were greasy and the chicken tasteless, rubbery hormone-fed meat — but because Ted, the owner, an Englishman, was living with Laurence, a black woman. Although Rosélie and Laurence sat coldly staring at each other, having absolutely nothing in common — Laurence working in a lingerie shop, preoccupied with thongs and frilly lace underwear, Rosélie preoccupied with her painting — Ted and Stephen, who had defied their society’s taboo, found themselves drawn closer together like two war veterans back from the front line. As usual Stephen would chatter away. But with Ted he didn’t talk about literature or politics. He would comment on the behavior of the royal family. According to him, Princess Diana had been a genuine antipersonnel mine that one of these days Buckingham Palace would step on. Besides, he declared, royalty was destined to be abolished. The prospect saddened Ted. He cherished the Queen and the Queen Mother, hats and handbags included. Neither Laurence nor Rosélie had an opinion on the question. Moreover, neither Stephen nor Ted asked them for one. In the distance Rosélie stared at the glow of Robben Island, which she had never visited and which was constantly calling her. A penal colony turned into a tourist attraction! Its lights winked in the distance, a reminder of a past that stubbornly refused to be transformed.
What do you do with the past? What a cumbersome corpse! Should we embalm it, idealize it, and let it take over our destiny? Or should we hurriedly bury it as a disgrace and forget it altogether? Should we metamorphose it?
Rosélie seldom accompanied Stephen to the department’s receptions. Cheese and cheap white wine in plastic cups. Very seldom to his colleagues’ parties. Braais and better-quality white wine. Never to his rounds of the waterfront jazz clubs. Jack Daniel’s and salted peanuts. She locked herself in her studio whenever he had guests. In short, her nocturnal activities boiled down to very little: evenings at the French Cultural Center and the DNA programs that had been severely trimmed since Simone left.