“That’s why I never sculpt humans. I create a world where they and their brutality, their craving for discovering, conquering, and dominating don’t exist. A world without Adam and Eve and their descendants of ruffians.”
Rosélie livened up. But this world without perpetrators, and therefore without victims, is basically no different from the one I dream of. Without race. Without class. Without borders.
“Utopia!” he said severely, shrugging his shoulders. “Come back to earth.”
Then, quite illogically, looking straight into her eyes, he took her hands and asked sweetly, but solemnly:
“When can you visit my studio? Be my guest. It’s situated in the very middle of the Detroit ghetto. I bet you’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like a war zone. Sometimes junkies scrounge a few dollars off me. Just to get a fix. My best friend Joe got twenty years for a rape he didn’t commit. In the end, his DNA saved him. He didn’t harbor any grudge. Allah came to him in jail and now he’s a fervent disciple. His dream is to convert me.”
There was an aura of immense seduction about him. How tempting to imagine oneself naked, screwed between his massive thighs!
No! Never again! Rosélie firmly shook her head. They would not see each other again!
And yet Rosélie and Anthony Turley saw each other a few weeks later at an exhibition on the Dogons of Mali. Ever since Marcel Griaule spent the night at Sanga over seventy years ago, the Dogons rank number one in the hit parade of African peoples. To what can we attribute this fascination? Whatever the explanation, the Soho Museum had re-created the famous cliffs at Bandiagara and shipped by plane three emaciated old men, exact replicas of Ogotemmeli; apart from the fact that their guns had not gone off in their faces while shooting at a porcupine, their eyes were still intact and “their brown tunics, drawn at the seams, were frayed by wear like an old battle flag.” The exhibition curator was explaining to a group of visitors the metaphysics and cosmogony of the Dogons, as rich as Hesiod’s, when Anthony and Rosélie bumped into each other in front of a “household mask.” They exchanged that loaded look tinged with longing of those who had wanted to go to bed together and hadn’t, then awkwardly shook hands. She could make out the surprise at the back of his eyes.
What the hell are you doing with this white guy?
If only he knew the truth! She almost burst into tears.
“What a stud! How did you meet him?” Stephen asked in surprise.
FOURTEEN
Fiela, we are on the fifth day of your trial and you still haven’t said a word. Public opinion is mounting against you. The experts have made their reports. How could they possibly assess you? You haven’t opened your mouth. They maintain, however, you are sane of mind. Apparently you are of above-average intelligence. It’s true at the mission school you carried off all the first prizes. Very early on, however, you had to abandon your studies. You who liked to read. At age fourteen the nuns found you work. As a domestic. The Afrikaner woman who employed you took a dislike to you, said you were a sly little thing. It’s true you confided in no one, since no one was interested in you. I know what that feels like. What’s the use of talking if nobody listens? It’s like a writer whom nobody reads. In the end, he gives up writing.
Rosélie escorted her patient to the street.
Patient No. 7
Joseph Léma
Age: 61
Nationality: Congolese
No profession
In actual fact, Joseph Léma was a former musician. In his country, at a time when he was intoxicated by fame and believed himself to be untouchable, he had composed an opera, Where Have All the Gazelles Gone? A genuine masterpiece, wrote the specialists, a combination of rock and traditional rhythms. In it he had dared criticize the dictatorship of the single party. The response had been swift. In the predawn hours, exactly at the time when gazelles go to drink, a band of henchmen had snatched him from the arms of his new mistress. He had then broken rocks for eight years in a camp up north, famished, humiliated, and beaten every day. He owed his salvation to the president’s eldest son, who had murdered his father by sprinkling a colorless, odorless, tasteless poison, as dangerous as curare, in his groundnut stew. This reprehensible deed, denounced by the international community, except for the United States, who backed the son, that is, the murderer, in the name of democracy, had at least one happy consequence: thousands of political prisoners were released from jail, something Amnesty International had never managed to do. Hiding out in Cape Town, where his wife and three of his concubines had followed him, Joseph was not only homesick, he was also crippled with pain. At times he could neither stand nor sit. Other times he was unable to walk. Nevertheless, Rosélie believed that his weekly visits — he didn’t miss a single one — were above all caused by the need to chew over the past. Every time she listened to him she was amazed. Who was the naive person who claimed that life is a long, slow-rolling river? On the contrary, life is a raging torrent, embedded with rapids, strewn with pitfalls. She watched him hobble back up the street, stiff as a poker, squeezing his butt as if he had a case of diarrhea.
On that particular morning, like a student slipping past her teacher’s watchful eye, she escaped from Dido. She decided to walk across Cape Town. Measure its pulse by the sound of its arteries. Breathe in the stench of its markets, the fragrance of its gardens, and the salty smell of the wharfs. She had seldom experienced such happiness, since she had never dared walk on her own. Even Stephen, who was far from timid, advised her against it.
She walked down Orange Avenue and crossed the Company’s Gardens, reveling in the scarlet splendor of the canna lilies and the ragged, motley crowd of junkies, jobless, homeless, beggars, and pickpockets looking for a gullible victim to rob.
Fiela’s trial was getting people so worked up that as a precaution the courthouse, a massive brownstone, typically Dutch construction, had been cordoned off. Only the lawyers, witnesses, and journalists were seen going up and down the steps. Behind a police line, idle onlookers were stamping with impatience. At one street corner, television cameras had been set up and journalists were aiming their microphones.
“What’s your opinion about the case?”
“I think it’s terrible!”
“And what else?”
“Terrible, terrible! It puts our country to shame.”
People have really nothing to say!
About twenty fanatics were waving banners to bring back the death penalty. Some people never miss an opportunity! Members of a sect, blacks and whites united in the same madness, dressed in identical flowing robes, predicted the end of the world. Here, they believed, were the first unnatural acts announced in the Scriptures.
“And men shall go into the caves of the rocks and into the holes of the earth, from before the terror of the Lord and from the glory of his majesty when he ariseth to shake mightily the earth.”
Others, more learned, jargoned in Latin.
Nos timemus diem judicii
Quia mali et nobis conscii.
Some crafty devils were selling portraits of Fiela they had sketched during the hearings, hinting at horns above her forehead. Although the argument for cannibalism had been more or less ruled out, there was no doubt Fiela had indulged in satanic rites on Adriaan’s body. The prosecuting attorney had called in neighbors who maintained exactly the opposite of what the preceding witnesses had said. Fiela terrified them. She never smiled. She had never given birth. Her breasts contained a bile that soiled her clothes during her diabolical suckling. Instead of intestines, her belly writhed with snakes. In the graveyards she parleyed with the dead. She took in wild beasts and trained them to do evil. A raven with wings the color of soot followed her wherever she went, faithful as a dog.