“Good night!”
In this hurriedly furnished and badly maintained villa, Faustin had been given a studio apartment that opened out onto the rusty waters of a swimming pool. The domestics, busy doing nothing, seldom paid it a visit. Since the windows were never opened, the air was musty. Faustin changed the sheets himself. Making frenzied love in such a decor, on this uncomfortable, lumpy mattress, Rosélie regained the verve of those happy, younger days with Salama Salama when they used to hide from the concierge and the rent they owed. She got the impression that having come full circle, she had been brought back to square one.
At times she was crushed by a feeling of guilt. It had only been three months, and she was already cheating on Stephen, whose nails were still growing under the earth. If he could see her, how he would suffer! Fortunately, the dead see nothing. The worms are at work under their eyelids draining the eyeballs to the bone. Other times, her thoughts took a completely different direction. She asked herself on what unconfessed frustrations, on what bundles of dirty washing shoved day after day into a corner of her inner self she was taking revenge. In fact, had Stephen been her benefactor? Sharing his existence, living in his shadow had perhaps caused her enormous damage and prevented her from becoming an adult.
One year, Stephen, who never gave up, got it into his head to organize an exhibit at the Espace des Amériques, a gallery flanking the university. During a dinner party, he had placed her beside Fina Alvarez, the Venezuelan woman who ran the gallery. They had taken to each other, even more so because they had both been regular customers at a Brazilian restaurant in Paris, savoring the same feijoada during the same years.
“Can you believe how long it took for us to meet?” lamented Fina. “Perhaps we were sitting next to each other. Perhaps you got up to go to the rest room and said ‘excuse me’ to me.”
Fina boasted of a black grandmother, a humble illiterate peasant, who had been a past master in the art of storytelling. The songs and tales she had heard when a child had been at the root of her artistic talent. Trembling at her judgment, Rosélie had invited her to her studio.
“You are a genius,” she had assured her, smoking cigarette after cigarette as she strode past the canvases. “Believe me, it’s not just talent you’ve got. It’s genius. Sheer genius!”
In spite of these hyperboles, Rosélie had remained uncompromising. No exhibit at the gallery to comply with Stephen’s schemes. Fina openly approved.
“You’re right. One must succeed on one’s own terms.”
She knew what she was talking about. She had divorced two men who, she claimed, had upset her temperament by forcing her to cook for them twice a day. Apparently, the separation hadn’t helped her, since after publishing three collections of poems and a novel by Actes Sud, she had given up and made do with a teaching job, which is the opposite of creativity. Fina was also a great walker. Every day, once she had finished striding through Riverside Park with Rosélie, she would accompany her back to 125th Street. But black grandmothers, although godmothers of creativity, are not a cure for bourgeois faintheartedness. Fina absolutely refused to venture any farther and left Rosélie to explore the forbidden territory of Harlem. Rosélie knew she would never be anything but an outsider. The articles in Ebony and Essence were not for her. Her name would never flash in neon lights in the pantheon of immortals. She would never be invited to those galas of self-celebration where the black creators take their revenge on centuries of Caucasian blindness. When nostalgia got the upper hand, she would go and eat grits and tripe at Sylvia’s, breathing in the intimacy from which she would forever be excluded. Back at the Riverside apartment, she would lock herself in her studio, the only place that was actually hers in a place filled with Stephen’s books, Stephen’s CDs, Stephen’s workout equipment, and his entire intrusive personality.
One day Fina introduced her to Jay Goldman. This former lover, still her good friend, as is the norm among intelligent people, dashed around Africa, squandering the fortune earned by the sweat of former generations on unusual artifacts. He was particularly proud of a collection of Luo water vessels in leather, calabash, wood, and tin; of Yoruba spinning tops, one of which was the size of a thimble; and of Pygmy bows and arrows, some of them still coated with their formidable poison. In a more serious vein, his collection included a number of Gauguins, Braques, and Picassos. Not only did Jay Goldman not spare his superlatives, but without bargaining he bought a series of paintings from Rosélie he named Nocturnal Dogs. He offered to organize a private exhibition for her in his loft, just steps away from the apartment of John-John Kennedy, who had not yet made his fatal dive into the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean. He would take care of the publicity, the invitations, and the reception. He also mentioned he was the friend of a well-known producer of an arts program on TV.
Rosélie, who was in seventh heaven, couldn’t remember how she came back to earth with a bump. How she had found out that although Jay had perhaps shared Fina’s bed in the past, and neither of them could remember much about it, he was in fact an old friend of Stephen’s. He had lived at his place in N’Dossou. Together with Fumio, the two men had started out on a search for Ashanti gold weights and driven in a jeep to Kumasi in Ghana. The tires had burst three times and they had slept two nights out in the open under the canopy of centuries-old silk cotton trees. At the end of their journey they were admitted to an audience with the Asantehene in his palace, and this visit had been worth all their tribulations.
In short, everything boiled down to a friendly plot behind her back. It dealt a serious blow to her friendship with Fina, and for the first time she thought of leaving Stephen. Lycées and colleges were mushrooming in Guadeloupe. Then there was France. She was bound to find some school where she could teach art. For weeks, Fina sent her delirious messages, as if they had had a homosexual affair.
Falvarez@hotmail.com
to
rthibaudin@aol.com
I’ve never stopped loving you. I didn’t betray you.
Fina
As for Stephen, he poked fun at her hostile reaction.
“Why are you blaming us? Because we wanted to help you? We could have been open about it. It could have been done lightheartedly and enjoyably, but you are so proud you forced us to lie.”
Proud?
Before slamming the door and running down the stairs, for he never took the elevator, exercise oblige, he concluded:
“You know, you’ll never make it on your own!”
How right he was! She had stubbornly persisted. One year later, she had succeeded in organizing an exhibition in a seedy-looking gallery in Soho. A disaster! After three days, the owners, two first-rate crooks, cleared out. Notified by Stephen, who bore no ill feeling and was always ready to intervene in the event of a catastrophe, the police recovered three of her paintings. The others had vanished! Oh yes, she had sold one picture to a Spanish museum for their collection of primitive art of the Americas! Another to the museum of womankind in Coyoacán. The M2A2, nothing alarming, just the acronym for the Martinican Museum for the Arts of the Americas, sent her an urgent request for a contribution. In short, at the age of fifty, she found herself to be an illustrious unknown. Her canvases were gathering dust by the dozens in the attic. She had been washed up on a foreign shore and she had no idea whether she loved it or hated it.