One evening, she was fed up with eating out of a tray on her knees in her room in front of a dreary television, despite its 126 channels, and decided to join the guests in the living room. She was amazed at their warm welcome. As if they were glad she was healed and back on earth. As if Stephen had been right when he claimed they loved her but never dared show it. It was the usual clique: specialists from the English and Comparative Literature Departments, with or without their spouses — at the mercy of that frightful species, the babysitter — favorite students, and Fina. Not only had Fina and Rosélie made up, but during those dark days Fina had proved to be her most loyal friend, wrapping her in tenderness and consideration. Stephen was fluttering around a stranger, obviously trying to charm him and include him in his crowd of admirers. When she came up, he hurriedly introduced her in his usual way:
“My wife, Rosélie.”
Smiles. Handshakes.
Love at first sight seems to belong to the outmoded props of melodrama. Today, most adults no longer believe in it any more than children believe in Father Christmas. Yet, that evening, Rosélie discovered its vitality and its powers.
Born and raised in Manhattan, Ariel was the son of a mestizo father, whose parents were an Amerindian from Colombia and a Japanese woman from Hawaii. His mother was the daughter of a Haitian and a Polish Jew whose parents had narrowly escaped the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. He spoke five languages fluently, each with the same foreign accent. He had so much mixed blood in him that he was unable to say which race he belonged to. What’s more, he was handsome. A handsomeness that was not particular to any one people, as if every category of human had harmoniously combined to create him. His skin was copper-colored, his thick hair curly black, and his full eyebrows perfect arcs above his eyes. Oh, the eyes, those windows of the soul, large and luminous, though somewhat languishing.
After a while, Ariel and Rosélie felt the need to get away from the hubbub of these irksome individuals desperately discussing Ridley Scott’s latest film, the tribulations of the Palestinians, and the famine in Ethiopia. To be alone together! The only refuge left was Rosélie’s studio, where only close friends were admitted. Yet, here she was letting in this man she had only just met.
Ariel inspected each canvas as a connoisseur and delivered his verdict. In his opinion, she was influenced by the German neo-Expressionists. Her painting was so violent, somber, and virile whereas she appeared so feminine and gentle. So she too liked monkeys, those miniature humans with the eyes of a clairvoyant. Did she know the story of that señora in Cuba who housed all sorts of chimpanzees in her palace? Had she ever visited Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico City? No? The power of art that forges a dialogue through time and space!
In fact, he was a friend of Fina’s. He ran a community arts center in the Bronx called La América in honor of José Marti, his hero. La América was unlike any other center. First of all, classes and supplies were free. Knowledge should not have to be paid for. Second, it had as its motto the phrase by Montaigne “An honest man is a many-sided man.” Although the center was mainly frequented by Latinos, given its location, it also attracted a fair number of young African-Americans, Caribbeans, and Asians. In fact, there was a bit of everything: old people of both sexes and every color who, after a life of hard work, were indulging in the delights of creativity, junkies endeavoring to replace one passion with another, the idle rich wanting to invent an occupation, the destitute trying to forget their destitution, atheists, and religious fanatics. All of them learned the essential truth, which may sound simplistic, that Art is the only language on the surface of the planet that can be shared without distinction of race or nationality, the two scourges preventing communication among men. At the end of the year Ariel would organize an exhibition and sale of his students’ work, the only materialistic activity permitted in this temple of spirituality where profit was spurned. Connoisseurs came from every country in South America. One year a group arrived from Japan, and another year some Senegalese traveled from Kaolack. The Spoleto Festival regularly bought several paintings. A few months earlier The New York Times had devoted an entire page to him: “Ariel Echevarriá, a man of globality, not globalization.”
Ariel ardently begged her to join him in this major project of his and teach painting (free) at La América.
Normally Rosélie would have rejected such an offer, with or without payment. The prospect of dealing with thirty undisciplined and quarrelsome students would have scared her off. But the times were not normal. It was the dawn of a new life.
Elie, the model husband, had gone to fetch the midwife. The baby girl presented well. Soon she would emerge from Rose’s womb, not as a pale, skinny newborn that only her mother’s milk and devotion would keep on this side of the world, but as a strong, beautiful child, ready for life’s adventures. Rose sang to her the barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann:
Belle nuit, succède au jour,
A nos douleurs, fais trêve.
Confused, Rosélie had trouble finding her words. Yet Ariel, who could already read her thoughts, knew that her silence meant she accepted. He then asked her when she could come to La América to meet the students and begin her mission.
On the other side of the bay windows, the slow procession of cars streamed along Riverside Drive while the mosaic of illuminated skyscrapers glittered in the distance. Nobody could say how this tête-à-tête would have ended if Fina, out of curiosity, hadn’t pushed open the door. She clapped her hands when she heard of Rosélie’s plans. Wasn’t this what she had been hoping for all these years? By breaking her dependence on Stephen, she would be able to prove to herself and everyone else her unusual talent. At the same time the expression in her dark eyes, almond-shaped beneath the knot of Frida Kahlo — like eyebrows, indicated she was not fooled as to the nature of Rosélie’s feelings, that she was overjoyed and offered her complicity.
Once the guests had left, however, Stephen ridiculed her plans with his usual verve. He was not venal. But why would she work for nothing? This volunteer work masked the regrettable exploitation of man by man, glorified in the name of Art. Did she realize the boredom and exhaustion involved in teaching? Besides, she wasn’t qualified to teach. Every man to his trade and there’ll be no complaints. As for this Ariel, he was an ambiguous individual. It was rumored he swung both ways. Where did the money he invested in the center come from? Some people accused him of having close ties with the drug world. More seriously, though, La América was based on an absurd utopia, a childish premise straight out of one of John Lennon’s songs.
And the world will be one.
Men, women, and children of every country, of every color, workers or not, unite under the banner of Art. To think that we all have a budding talent just waiting to be tapped, how naive can you get! Some are born talented. Some are geniuses. Others are nobody at all. He had gone with Fina to an exhibition of the students’ work at La América. Pathetic! But nobody dared tell the truth to the Bronx. Tell the truth and run.
Rosélie did not contradict Stephen but did as she pleased. The next morning, no sooner had he turned his back than she went out, much to Linda’s dismay. For months she hadn’t breathed in the smells of New York. The city was in a festive spring mood and Nature was singing like Charles Trenet:
Y a de la joie!
Partout, y a de la joie!
The sun was laughing at the blue corners of the sky. All along Broadway the cherry trees were budding, waist deep in a splash of forsythia blooms. She took her seat in a bus that, cleaving the city, climbed up and up toward the Bronx, taking on an increasingly somber, increasingly humble, and increasingly hospitable humanity as it slowly progressed. When a black kid sitting next to her placed his hand on her knee in a friendly gesture, she felt that the contact that had been broken, through no fault of her own, had been renewed again after all these years.