In fact, the DNA was dying.
They had hurriedly elected another Martinican woman as president who taught music theory at the French lycée. Whereas her students created mayhem in her classroom when they were not skipping class en masse, her husband was a sports idol whose picture, like Che Guevara’s in the sixties, hung in every student’s room. He coached a soccer team that had won the African Juniors Cup. They had hoped therefore that her appointment would arouse a competitive spirit in her and she would take the DNA to new heights. Nothing of the sort happened. She lacked savoir faire. In eight months she had only invited a relatively unknown Caribbean scholar, who happened to be in Cape Town for a conference on aesthetics.
Instead of a routine, Faustin established the unexpected and spelled disorder.
She waited for him in vain for days on end. He would turn up unexpectedly, stay for a few minutes, leave for some mysterious rendezvous, come back, leave again, then decide to stay. Each time, the Mercedes zoomed up peaceful Faure Street. When he spent the night, his bodyguards, playing belote in the garden and downing beer after beer, disturbed everyone’s peace. Except for Deogratias, whom nothing could disturb. Rosélie trembled at the thought of the neighbors’ hostility. This would be their excuse for evicting her from the neighborhood. Disturbing the peace at night.
As soon as he came in the front door, it was a hubbub of telephone conversations, CNN and BBC News, and commentaries from Radio France Internationale. Since he still couldn’t sleep — on that point Rosélie had to admit she had been ineffective — he dragged her to nightclubs, not to dance (they were past the age, although in Guadeloupe arthritis doesn’t stop the old and achy from shaking a leg) but to listen to music. He had a particular liking for the Dogon, owned by some Malians, because the singer, a Senegalese, could be mistaken for the voice of the Gabonese Pierre Akendengué. He reduced Cape Town to its French-speaking population, for in a certain way he despised South Africa. Not for the political reasons she had heard voiced over and over again by Stephen. Simply because it did not form part of the prestigious circle of countries that spoke French. For him, to speak French forty years after African independence remained an honor and a privilege.
Faustin provided no information about himself, as if introspection were banned. What sort of child, teenager, and student had he been? What did he think of the Eastern bloc, where he had studied for many years? Of the United States, where he had met his wife? This last point intrigued Rosélie. Retrospective jealousy? Not only that. She graced this stranger with the characteristics of the African-American women she had met, shivering as she remembered them, and realizing that they more than anyone had convinced her of her shortcomings by subtly setting her against a standard she could never achieve: that of matron, poto-mitan, of the civilizations of the diaspora. What had she accomplished in which the Race could glorify?
In short, Faustin’s conversation was always superficial and insignificant. He described his grandparents’ rugo, the peace that once enveloped the country of a thousand hills, and the village traditions of long ago. He showed no interest in her island, which he would have been unable to find on a map. He took no interest in her painting. The only time he had walked through her studio, he had emerged stunned:
“My God, it’s Bluebeard’s closet!”
He no longer alluded to Stephen as if it were better to forget this episode in Rosélie’s life. Adult discussions on topics such as regional development, the future of the continent, and globalization he would reserve for Deogratias. After all, both men, originating from the same country, shared the same language, Rosélie told herself when these endless conversations drove her to distraction. He holed himself up to talk business with Raymond, his inseparable friend from Cameroon who had never lost the ways of ten years mistakenly spent in a seminary before giving in to his inordinate taste for women. On a courtesy visit to her studio he had been swept off his feet unexpectedly and surprisingly, like every infatuation, by a painting called Tabaski. A sheep with its throat slit, its scarlet blood draining into a blue enamel basin. He had questioned her. Did she think, like he did, that such sacrilegious practices should be banned, and that only the sacrifice by the Son of God counted? Did she hate Islam, like he did, the intolerance of the Muslims, their violence, and the dangers to the world they represented? Rosélie sharply defended her point of view. On the contrary, this religion that accompanied each of its rituals with a massacre of the innocents fascinated her. In N’Dossou the Muslims were mainly immigrants, Senegalese, Burkinabés, recognizable by their boubous and slippers they dragged through the filthy streets. Theirs was the Mossada district, huddled around a mosque. People in the neighborhood complained of the muezzin’s call to prayer. But Rosélie adored this high-pitched, lugubrious voice whose call to prayer was like a summons to death.
From then on, weekends were spent at Constantia, where Raymond’s villa stood not far from the home of Bebe Sephuma, who could be seen driving past at the wheel of her Porsche.
In actual fact, Raymond was the soul behind the association with Faustin. He was the one who had managed to sell as far as Pietersburg a type of garbage can called an Afri-bin. The huge orange ones took pride of place at crossroads. Smaller versions, green or blue, clung proudly to the backs of the garbage trucks. Raymond could talk forever on the subject.
“The major problem of Africa is that there is no public opinion. So a handful of crooks can systematically bleed the continent dry. So why isn’t there a public opinion? Because people have no strength left. And why haven’t they any strength left? Because of the garbage. They throw it anywhere. Walk into a popular district of Yaoundé or Madagascar, for instance, and you’re swimming in garbage: on the sidewalks, at street corners, in the gutters, everywhere! The sun turns it into a terrible stench, but above all a powder keg of germs that the stray dogs tote from one end of the city to the other. So babies get sick; children’s sores become infected and fester. All sorts of epidemics spread among the grown-ups. Since the sick, the helpless, and the feeble are too poor to get treatment, the dictators take advantage of them and lay down the law. With Afri-bin, that’s history! Practical, cheap, easy to handle, and airtight! Garbage smack into the bin! People become healthy and, consequently, critical.”
When he had finished boasting of his merchandise, he clapped his hands and a cloud of domestics in dubious white uniforms emerged from the kitchen. They poured pink champagne into blue-stemmed flutes and served koki on silver gilt plates under the doleful eye of Thérèse. Thérèse was as apathetic as her husband was bursting with energy. Every day she leafed through Divas and Amina. Or else she watched Egyptian and Indian films on her state-of-the-art DVD player. She missed her children. Except for Berline, her latest little girl, constantly clinging to her breast despite her twenty-four months and her two rows of incisors, the five others lived in Montreal with her sister — for their education, she explained.
Thérèse felt nothing but antipathy for South Africa. Everything antagonized her: the crudeness of the Afrikaners, the arrogance of the coloureds, and the xenophobia of the blacks. Once she had gotten that out of her system, she consented to forget about Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh in Zahreela Insaan and join Rosélie to watch the adventures of Jackie Chan in Shanghai Kid. Then she drank gallons of Rooibos tea before returning to her two favorite subjects of conversation: her love for her children and her hatred of South Africa. When Rosélie withdrew with Faustin, Thérèse and Raymond gave them a smile of complicity, like lenient parents toward a couple of youngsters they had taken in.