“Listen to them,” he sneered. “What a wonderful world we live in! Especially for the Arabs, blacks, Palestinians, Israelis, Indians, Pakistanis, Afghans, and Iraqis.”
Stephen had bought a station wagon off a colleague leaving for Australia, which was too big, three times too heavy, and guzzled too much unleaded gas. He hardly drove it, having failed to interest Rosélie in the surrounding natural splendors. Niagara Falls, water, water everywhere!
On the other hand, I’d like to visit the Grand Canyon and throw myself into the void like Thelma and Louise.
Rosélie loved the drive back home at night. They would take up their position in a slow procession of cars, as if they were following a hearse, and cross the bridge. Facing them, Manhattan opened up like a scene from an opera, ablaze with lights, where the skyscrapers represented the divas and portly tenors, painted and dressed in their shiny, frazzled costumes. Sometimes they would stop in a bustling restaurant where everyone was yelling at the top of their voices. Then they would go and listen to jazz in a basement club, squeezed up against each other, experiencing the same vibrations. Unexpectedly, the music conjured up the image of Ariel. The pain assumed the sounds of the muffled trumpet.
One evening Amy insisted they stay for dinner. It was Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. She had cooked a traditional meal of latkes and brisket in gravy. After they lit the menorah, a few friends sat down informally around the table in the dining room. Among them were the inevitable Andy and Alice.
The first half of the meal was monopolized by Andy in a solo performance. He showered his listeners with anecdotes at which he was usually the first and only one to roar with laughter. Example: Invited to a Hasidic wedding, something quite unprecedented, he met one of his patients, whose eight children he had delivered. As he held out his hand to shake hers, she had lowered her eyes and murmured: “I’m sorry, Doctor. I don’t touch men!”
Are you laughing?
The second half was monopolized by Andy and Alice in a duo. The previous summer they had made a trip to Nigeria, a pilgrimage, in fact, for they had both been in the Peace Corps there fifteen years earlier and had fallen in love with each other. The Peace Corps, ah! What an esteemed organization that brings modernity to Africa absolutely free of charge!
Really? I heard just the opposite. Some see in it the hand of the CIA.
During this second visit, their host had been no other than Wole Soyinka, the renowned writer, who had gone to great lengths to get the Americans to boycott his country. Nigeria, it should be recalled, although birthplace of the first African Nobel Prize winner, proved to be a dunce when it came to democracy. Andy and Alice described in length the prevailing incompetence, chaos, and corruption. No importance was placed on human life. The wonderful poet Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight members of his party had been hanged. Political rivals died a suspicious death in prison. Tribunals ordered adulterous women to be stoned, for women are the first victims of violence by their governments.
There are no dictatorships without sexism. Example: the Taliban and Afghan women.
Rosélie didn’t have time to meditate on such a negative vision of Mother Africa before Stephen took advantage of a brief pause in the monologues. He straightaway deplored the violence of black gangs in the United States. His words fell like stones dropped into the depths of a crevasse by a clumsy spelunker. The guests forgot to ask for seconds of the latkes. In a deathly silence, Stephen totaled up the number of blacks in high-security prisons and on death row, accused of murder, rape, and armed robbery, black criminals whose faces were splashed across TV screens.
“You’re forgetting they’re not all guilty,” retorted Andy, choking with anger. “American justice is so inhuman, it crushes the weak and the poor! Those who can afford to pay lawyers with their fat bank accounts are declared innocent. Whereas the others—”
“Even if these blacks appear guilty, and that’s the impression the police, the media, and the government want to give, they are, in fact, victims,” interrupted Alice impetuously. “Victims of the iniquity of the American social system.”
“Inhuman justice for the weak! Iniquitous social system!” repeated Stephen, with a fake naive expression. “American democracy is full of flaws!”
Andy and Alice agreed.
“So,” continued Stephen. “If I were an African-American, instead of meddling in the rest of the world’s affairs, I would sweep in front of my own door.”
Thereupon, he excused himself from dessert and, amid a deathly silence, headed for the door, dragging Rosélie with him. Once outside in the garden, he doubled up laughing. He was still laughing behind the wheel.
“Did you see their faces? The truth always produces the same effect.”
This episode, however, did not sound the death knell between Rosélie and Amy, as very well might have been the case. See the trouble with Fina.
It merely provided them with a new topic for discussion during their tête-à-têtes in the park.
“Admit he was rude,” Amy concluded. “Admit it. He was at the limit of racism. After you left, Alice cried, she is so sensitive. To make such a speech like that about African-Americans and their unending struggle.”
Rosélie tried to defend Stephen. Far from denigrating the glorious struggles of the past, and perhaps of the present, he was preaching for a little humility. He would like Andy and Alice to stop sermonizing, coming from a community who have been left out of the American dream, in which, moreover, nobody believes any longer.
Without admitting it, Rosélie was somewhat proud of Stephen. He had refused to be a mere onlooker, which she had so often contented to be. He had refused to be invisible and forced the Other to see him for what he is worth.
From that day on Alice and Andy treated Rosélie with somber compassion and no longer spoke to her. A sister who stays with a Caucasian of the most dangerous sort can only be pitied. Was it masochism? Certainly not! She was a living example of Mayotte Capécia’s complex of lactification, so magnificently denounced by Fanon. Him again!
“She is asking for nothing, demanding nothing, except for a little whiteness in her life.”
Stephen, the subject of so much disapproval, felt no remorse. However, he thought it wiser not to set foot again at Amy and Caleb’s. When he came to fetch Rosélie, he would sound his horn in front of the garden gate or send Mario to get her. Mario was an illegal immigrant. No job, however thankless, deterred him. He worked as a driver for Stephen, walked the Dalmatians for the second-floor tenants, washed the windows of the apartment on the fourth floor, and took the twins on the eighth to school. He also helped the old couple on the tenth to piss and bought them their ground beef, the only food their toothless mouths could eat. You didn’t dare whisper to him that his physique of a Greek god could have got him a less exhausting and more lucrative type of job.
Caleb took a liking for his curly head and dark eyes. He found him a job as a security guard. Mario therefore left Manhattan to the annoyance of all those whom he had helped. Henceforth, dressed in a heavy leather jacket, wearing a flat cap, and armed with a revolver that didn’t suit his gentle disposition, he monitored the comings and goings at the hospital and kept the undesirables at a distance.
At the start of the summer, Andy and Alice emerged from their silence and invited Rosélie to exhibit at an arts festival organized by an African-American association. Once she had got over her initial surprise, she realized that these good shepherds hadn’t lost hope of bringing their lost sheep back to the fold, in other words returning her to the Holy of Holies, the Race. What surprised her even more was that she was delighted by the invitation. Like a pariah suddenly invited to the master’s table. Like a condemned person suddenly pardoned and brought back to the company of the righteous.