“Don’t you have the same problem with French and Creole?” he asked. “Aren’t the genuine masterpieces written in Creole?”
Rosélie, whose only knowledge of French Caribbean writing was The Bridge of Beyond, read one very rainy season, knew nothing about these issues. Olu went on to inquire about Aimé Césaire. He had had the pleasure of meeting him during his exile in the Caribbean. With a simplicity that did him credit, the great man had received him at city hall and shown him his island. What an unforgettable memory! The poet knew every Latin name for every tree, plant, flower, and blade of grass. Rosélie was about to take her leave when an idea crossed her mind. Surely the Ministry of Education didn’t forbid donations to private individuals. Where was Chris Nkosi?
Olu seemed troubled. It so happened he knew Chris Nkosi very well. Ever since he was a small boy. When he was four his father had vanished without notice. An association Olu ran called “Let Them Come unto Me” had taken care of the family, the wife left behind without a cent and seven children. Chris was a good boy. He had passed his certificate the previous year and left school. As luck would have it, a Catholic foundation had immediately offered him a job in one of its schools. Rosélie was surprised that Chris Nkosi had not continued a career in the theater, since according to Stephen he was so gifted. Theater? It was as if she had uttered an obscenity. Olu shook his head furiously. Chris Nkosi was now an elementary school teacher. He taught English grammar and the history of Africa. He was married. If Rosélie intended to give him the computer in memory of Stephen, he would certainly refuse it. They had quarreled. Quarreled? That’s news to me! Rosélie recalled the young man crying hot tears at the funeral and stammering out his poem. Surely the quarrel couldn’t have been very serious. On the contrary, Olu assured her. Stephen had tried to put pressure on Chris to force him to become an actor. Faced with his rebuff, he had insulted him, calling him a coward who was betraying his vocation. Chris couldn’t put up with it. Olu stared at her with sudden hostility.
“You know as well as I do that the honorable professor couldn’t tolerate contention. Everyone had to do things his way. As a European, he wanted to do good in Africa, but he had the wrong idea of going about it. The theater! The theater! I won’t go so far as France in 1789 saying: ‘The Revolution doesn’t give a damn about artists!’ But do we really need theater, especially Western theater, at this moment in time?”
Rosélie was dumbfounded. She couldn’t possibly believe Olu. Stephen would have wanted to regiment Chris’s future to the point of quarreling with him? They were hiding something from her.
Once outside the school, she was amazed to find the sun still in its place, sitting stupidly in the middle of the sky, and the day was radiant. Two buses cluttered up Albert Luthuli Square. A crowd of laughing, enthusiastic tourists was piling into the craft center. Inside her the mood was darker. She had the feeling she had suffered the rebuffs on behalf of Stephen. It was as if he were no longer acceptable. Nobody wanted anything more to do with him.
Faure Street: Inspector Lewis Sithole was waiting for her, leaning against the traveler’s tree, poring over the Cape Tribune that Olu had censured. He lost no time with polite conversation and, folding the paper, got straight to the point.
“I was right in thinking your husband didn’t just go out to buy cigarettes. Thanks to your cooperation, by giving us his mobile phone, we have proof that he received a call at zero hours seventeen minutes.”
Seventeen minutes past midnight?
Stephen would never let himself be disturbed in the middle of the night. It must have been a mistake, a wrong number. Things like that happen!
Inspector Lewis Sithole went on as if her interruption were not worth stopping for.
“We had no trouble finding where the call came from. A public telephone booth. This confirms our suspicions that the caller was not taking any chances and did not want to call from home.”
What story was this he was imagining? Yet another one who had missed his calling! He should have been writing detective stories. And where was this famous telephone booth?
“In Green Point.”
“Green Point?” Rosélie repeated, stunned.
Neither she nor Stephen had friends in this suburb, a paradise for students and backpackers, which had nothing to offer but cheap hotels. It regularly made front-page news because of its high crime rate. Nothing very sophisticated, however: muggings, burglaries, and passersby beaten up for a few rand.
Lewis Sithole stared at her.
“You know no one who lives in this neighborhood?”
She shook her head. He didn’t push the matter and said in a strange voice, both reassuring and threatening:
“Never mind. We’ll find him, this mysterious caller.”
Who would want to kill Stephen? Though certainly no saint in a stained-glass window, he had been a dispenser of good works. He wrote hundreds of letters of recommendation for his students. He lent considerable sums of money to his young colleagues. He would involve himself and his time personally. In New York he paid daily visits to Mount Sinai hospital, where a Jane Austen specialist was dying from cancer of the larynx. He who hated children was prepared to take in the twins of an assistant who was trying to finish her thesis on Mary Wollstonecraft by the end of the year. He gave free English lessons to Haitian, Puerto Rican, and Senegalese associations.
Inspector Lewis Sithole had no sooner left than Dido arrived with her inevitable tray of coffee.
“What’s he on about again?” she grumbled.
Rosélie didn’t have the courage to repeat his wild imaginings and merely recounted her day’s misadventures, then looked her straight in the eyes.
“You didn’t like Stephen very much, did you?”
Dido rolled her hazel eyes and stared at a point in the distance.
“Me, not like Stephen? Oh, come on!” she protested.
After a few moments, since Rosélie’s silence demanded an answer, she reluctantly confessed.
“No, I didn’t like him. He was an egoist and a despot. He prevented you from being yourself.”
Myself?
But who am I? What beast, what flesh-eating fish? My teeth are pointed and my tongue is forked. Sometimes I can be seen swallowing in one gulp the insects attracted to my sweet smell. The bats are my sisters: half rat, half bird; ill at ease in the glare of daylight. We spend our time hanging upside down, seeking the dark that will take us back to the womb that bore us.
Elie and Rose never stopped thanking the Good Lord for their kind, sweet daughter, their only consolation in the shipwreck of their marriage. Without Rosélie they would have separated a long time ago. But in our family there must be no child of a divorce. A little girl needs a papa and a maman in order to grow up, even if they do hurl insults at each other day in and day out. The quarrels of Elie and Rose took a Homeric turn. She accused him, a mulatto as poor as a church mouse, of marrying her for the hundred acres of land Ebenezer, her father, had sown with fruit trees under the sun in Gourbeyre and for the houses he rented out just about everywhere on the island. Elie retorted that Ebenezer had stolen the property from some poor wretch. Maybe his own family was poor, but at least it was honest.