Rosélie bought a pile of newspapers and settled down in the back of a café. The Cape Tribune, The Herald, and The Guardian ceaselessly maintained that Fiela was a witch. There was nothing new in that! Haven’t women always been accused of witchcraft? Ever since the Middle Ages in Europe.
Fiela had deceived everybody by playing the model wife and stepmother. Only The Times took the trouble to report on the accuser, Julian, the other side of the triangle. Its version was explosive. Burning with an incestuous love for Fiela, who hadn’t reciprocated, Julian had murdered his father, and out of revenge put the blame on his stepmother.
Bravo! Only a Greek tragedy can offer such a web of intrigue.
The peaceful atmosphere in the café was soon interrupted by two nutcases, ready to come to blows because of Fiela. Rosélie wisely asked for the check.
For no particular reason, she headed for the Threepenny Opera. She hadn’t been back since her fruitless visit almost a month ago. Like everyone else, Mrs. Hillster had her nose in the newspapers. Going her own sweet way, she had formed her own opinion, radically different from the editorials. According to her, it was a case of legitimate defense. Fiela had discovered a terrible secret concerning Adriaan and murdered him. What secret? What can cause a wife to murder her husband?
Don’t tell me it’s adultery!
Rosélie got the strange impression Mrs. Hillster was giving her a shifty look and was speaking about her. It was as if Rosélie was discovering for the first time this frosty powdered face whose razor-thin lips dripped Revlon-red. A strange gleam danced in her mauve-colored eyes. It was as if a spitefulness had been released, up till then hidden under the smiles and polite small talk. Mrs. Hillster had launched into the tale of a husband who kept a woman in Cape Town, another in Jo’burg, a third in Bloemfontein, and a fourth in Maputo. Here he was known under such and such a name, over there under another, and elsewhere even a third. It must be said to his credit, however, that in each home he showered his many wives with equal tenderness and consideration, and their joy knew no bounds.
After all, isn’t that the main point? thought Rosélie. Why try and unmask the face others are hiding from us?
Misfortune comes from knowing the truth.
Fortunately, she kept her uncalled-for thoughts to herself. Mrs. Hillster continued to condemn these women, who are blind to the facts and do not deserve to be called victims. There are certain telltale signs in a couple: the smell of perfume on a jacket lapel, a reluctance to make love, contradictions, and incoherent stories.
“Something like that could never have happened to me,” she maintained. “Simon could never have pulled the wool over my eyes. I’ve got a sixth sense.”
Rosélie felt increasingly ill at ease. She was being targeted, she was sure of it.
Mrs. Hillster finally changed the subject. She couldn’t find a serious buyer for her villa and shop. Nothing was selling in Cape Town, whose reputation got worse by the day. And then people preferred the coast.
Although she felt distraught, Rosélie couldn’t help noticing the presence of a young coloured sales assistant, with a mane of hair like Absalom was said to have. Beneath this ragged frieze, his face was the very picture of vice and brutality, despite a certain animal charm. A perfect contrast with the angelic features of Bishupal. Had he already left for England?
“Oh no! He sent me this friend Archie because he’s ill,” Mrs. Hillster replied, with a painful look. “He’s been ill now for some time and refuses to see a doctor. I’m very concerned about him for he’s like a son to me. He’s so sensitive, so intelligent.”
Stephen too maintained that Bishupal was an exceptional boy. He had given him novels and then poetry to read. Bishupal had adored Keats and the odes, especially “Ode to a Nightingale.”
My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains.
Not surprising. It’s the one everyone likes!
As for Rosélie, she was incapable of giving an opinion on his intellectual qualities. Whenever she was around, Bishupal’s mouth opened and shut in silence like a carp’s. Dido treated him like a leper and never let him inside the house. He would stand waiting for Stephen to come back in front of his office. When standing got to be too much, he would crouch on his heels like a snake charmer. Only the rattlesnake was missing.
After a while Rosélie, feeling hurt, took her leave. Mrs. Hillster used to revolve around Stephen like the earth around the sun. Now she seemed suddenly to be turning her back on him, even rising up in arms against him.
Back home, a letter was waiting for her.
Short, scribbled on cream-colored stationery from the Royal Orchid Sheraton in Johannesburg (three hundred dollars per night). Faustin informed her that, God be praised, he had finally obtained his nomination. As a result, he had to go straight to Rome to sign his contract and make urgent administrative arrangements. He had no time to come back to Cape Town to say good-bye. But he was expecting her in Washington as soon as possible.
“Don’t worry. Raymond will take care of everything.”
Rosélie was hurting.
Given her state of mind, she was quite convinced that this missive was a way of breaking up without him getting his hands dirtied. It never occurred to her that Faustin had perhaps so little intuition, so little consideration of who she was and what her life was like that he was sure a word or sign from him would send her running to meet him wherever he was.
So, except for Ariel, the men in her life, Salama Salama, Stephen, and now Faustin, had ditched her in one way or another without further ado. What was wrong with her to arouse such offhand behavior? She looked back on the episodes of her life she had preferred to forget. All those wounds infecting under the scab!
Salama Salama, the original wound.
Surrounded by admirers, Salama Salama had flashed the smile of a star sitting on the terrace of the Maheu café in Paris. Not only did he have the dreadlocks of Bob Marley, but his exceptional talent set him apart, dazzling his growing number of fans. He had given a long whistle of approval when Rosélie sat down at a nearby table, holding a Dalloz law manual to give her a sense of composure and not idle her time away smoking menthol cigarettes and lapping up the air on the boulevard. Her love life had been meager up till then, that we know. One or two cousins, the son of a good friend of Rose’s. Few kisses, nothing but platitudes. Suddenly she found herself wanted, desired, and treasured. She hadn’t heeded the warnings:
“My dear, be careful. Africa’s a wicked stepmother.”
“You’ll end up waiting for happiness.”
She had followed him to N’Dossou, where his family had welcomed her with open arms, his mother even finding that she looked like the reincarnation of her young sister, carried away by typhoid fever. Not surprising. The legend, one of those legends close family ties beget about their family tree, had it that their ancestor came from Guadeloupe. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Sylvestre Urbain d’Amélie, a merchant from Nantes, owner of a plantation at Grippon, Petit-Bourg, and warehouses at La Pointe, together with Eusèbe, his Creole slave, born on the plantation, old enough to be his son, but in actual fact his lover — at that time people had no morals, not like today — had anchored off N’Dossou to load a cargo of precious red timber. Many a book has been written about the red timber of Brazil. But N’Dossou’s was just as good. When Eusèbe got lost in the forest, Sylvestre, after weeks of fruitless searching and half crazed with grief, reluctantly gave the order to his crew to depart. He never got over Eusèbe’s disappearance and died the following year clutching to his heart a locket with Eusèbe’s portrait painted by Dino Russetti, the Florentine who had settled in Guadeloupe in 1704. Eusèbe, however, was not dead. He had been picked up by the Pygmies, who had taught him their music and how to hunt elephants. Unfortunately, the great trees, the lianas, the miasmas, and insects were anathema to him. Born on an island, he was a lover of water. Together with the wife they gave him, he reached the estuary of the Adzope River, where he founded a family. Ever since that day, the Urbain-Amélies — with Eusèbe the particle “de” disappeared — considered themselves apart, not quite natives, yet not quite foreigners either. They had always colluded with the colonizer whose language they practiced. The men, often hardened sailors, brought back with them girls picked up in faraway ports. Back in N’Dossou, these women mingled their customs with that of the tribe, and that’s how things came to be. Thus Salama Salama’s grandmother Lina, on his father’s side, came from the Cape Verde islands, from a whorehouse in Mindelo. Apart from French, the Urbain-Amélies spoke Portuguese, Cantonese, which they got from Yang-Li, a Chinese great-great-grandmother, and N’Dossou’s one hundred and three national languages.