Would she see him again? Did she want to see him again? She could find nothing wrong with him: perfectly groomed, smelling of Acqua de Giò, and good in bed. A lot of kissing, embracing, playing, and fondling, as if penetration was not the main issue.
That same evening he once more came through the door of the Saigon, where the civil servants recognized him and cast disapproving looks. A month later she moved in with him.
It was love with a capital L.
Rosélie put on the clothes carefully chosen by Dido. A dark brown boubou with a fitted yolk embroidered in golden yellow, and a matching head tie. She walked down the stairs in a regal manner befitting her role and entered her consulting room. Népoçumène was waiting for her, his face a little less haggard than usual. Was he sleeping now? Were his nightmares beginning to leave him in peace? Did he hear his wife’s voice? She had told him over and over again he would hear her once he had forgiven her for having abandoned him. That was the most difficult part. She herself still couldn’t hear Stephen’s voice. All too often she was overwhelmed by bitterness and a kind of anger toward him.
Rosélie’s gift became evident very early on. At the age of six all she had to do was place her little hands over Rose’s eyelids for poor Rose to sleep like a baby until nine in the morning. Until then Rose had been tormented by Elie’s absences; her body had begun to swell considerably, and as a result she could never get to sleep. At the age of ten Rosélie had made a pack of Creole dogs turn tail as they were about to attack her and her cousins on the road in Montebello just before Bois-Sergent, where her aunt had a house. On weekends, unbeknownst to the skeptics in the family, Papa Doudou, her grandfather on her father’s side, took her to his property at Redoute, where the cows turned their backs on the bull and the mares refused to be mounted by the stud. She would look deep into their big gelatin eyes and the recalcitrant females would be completely transformed, as pliable as putty in your hands. Bad-mouthers, and there are some in every family, were skeptical and made no bones about it. Rosélie had been incapable of predicting that the same Papa Doudou would die of a hemorrhage from his testicles being ripped off by the horns of a small bull he was breaking in. And during Hurricane Deirdre she had been unable to foresee that a breadfruit tree would smash through Uncle Eliacin’s house and flatten it like a cowpat, killing him outright as well as his wife and five children with the American TV names of Warner, Steve, Jessica, Kevin, and Randy. Okay, she had seen Deirdre coming. But you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to see a hurricane. Hurricanes are regular visitors. Year after year they arrive from the coast of Africa. What matters is their strength, and that is never the same.
As an adult she would have liked to turn her powers to good account. But astrology? Palmistry? Chiropractic? Osteopathy? Shiatsu? All that is not very serious. So she had got bogged down in her law studies. Elie had so admired the black robes around him that he dreamed of putting his daughter in one. Oh, let her tear the French language to pieces like lawyer Démosthène, the famous bard of independence! As for Rose, she regretted her daughter had not gone into politics. Her father had been a local hero whose full-length portrait occupied a place of honor in the living room.
If Dido hadn’t been there, she would still be looking for herself.
She liked listening to the way Stephen relived their first meeting. It became fictional and poetical, as if it were a chapter in a novel, perhaps Irish, perhaps not.
“I landed up here a few months ago. Why, you ask? Because I realized I was becoming the spitting image of my father. I could no longer put up with London, its gray skies, my bedsitter, my teaching job, the boredom of the pubs and the Sunday papers. At least in N’Dossou everything seemed new under the sun. Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. One evening, after a scorching-hot day, I was searching for a cool breeze along the seafront, where the wind blows in from the ocean with occasional gusts and cools the sweat on your skin, when, out of breath and tired of tramping in the sand, I pushed open the door of a bar with a facade smeared in blue and a sign painted with palm trees: the Saigon. A stroke of luck. The shadowy interior smelled of peppermint, reminding me of my childhood. On summer visits my aunt Chloé, my mother’s sister, always used to give me a peppermint drink in a blue-stemmed glass. A view of the Mekong ran above the circular bar in bamboo. Another depicted the bay of Along with its extraordinary rocks like pieces in a game of chess. Ana was washing the glasses. Tran Anh, as usual, was idly blowing smoke rings into the air. You were sitting alone at your table, a little to the left. You were wearing a green dress with an orange pattern. [What was this about a green dress? He must have been dreaming. I loathe the color green.] I never accost women. Their cold eyes, their cruel teeth, and the way they have of sizing up and assessing men scares me. Will he be able to satisfy me? Black women were foreign, mysterious, a nebulous, unfathomable world. The other side of the moon. You looked so lost, so vulnerable that by comparison I felt serene and powerful. God Almighty. You were sitting behind a pile of magazines. You were leafing through one. Yet it was obvious you couldn’t care less what was flicking past your eyes. Your mind was elsewhere.”
Oh yes, my mind was elsewhere!
She was asking herself the same questions over and over again. What’s going to become of me? How long can I last without a cent to my name? What is there left to sell? I’ve already sold for next to nothing my gold choker and chain, given me by Aunt Léna. The other jewels are from Rose. I could never part with them.
Dominique, a chance acquaintance who worked in real estate, had offered her a studio apartment. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. The apartment was badly situated in the Ferbène district, a shantytown, sitting in the middle of a swamp that was supposed to have been drained during the public works projects at the time of independence. After forty years, the work had never been completed and the swamp had turned into a quagmire. Life there was not worth a dime. On the sidewalks garbage piled up higher than a man. But could they really be called sidewalks? The tangle of streets were flooded all year round with a brackish soup. La Liberté, the name of this rat- and vermin-infested building, housed the studio apartment generously loaned by Dominique. Ten stories high, elevator chronically in need of repair, cassava and plantain peelings as well as banana skins, green and yellow, littering the hallways, and raggedy clothes hung out to dry on the balconies. It overlooked a panorama of shacks. Beyond, a pallid and disheveled ocean regularly vomited up corpses. One never knew whether they were foolhardy fishermen, suicides tired of vegetating without love or money, or victims of revenge wreaked by parents or neighbors.
One morning Rosélie, plus two metal canteens of the type you never see now called cabin trunks, plus a plywood box, climbed out of one of Navitour’s trucks.
NAVITOUR TRUCK RENTAL
WHEN YOU WANT IT, HOW YOU WANT IT!
The building’s residents were stupefied. Okay, okay, Allah doesn’t have to be merciful. But the least we can expect is that he hasn’t gone off his rocker. In the glossy pages of GuidArt they had often drooled over the new tenant — that’s her, I’m telling you, beside Salama Salama, the famous reggae singer, beloved by young and old alike. Salama Salama’s real name was Sylvestre Urbain-Amélie. He had had to change his name for the stage, showbiz rules. Salama Salama sounds strange and exotic. What country was he from?