Mother, tell me where I should live and where I should die.
It’s true that living with Faustin, she would be spared such misfortune. First of all, they would have a car. They would live in the wealthy African-American district, whose houses ape the Caucasians’ in munificence and ostentation. The Gold Coast, they call it. They would have a chauffeur for the Mercedes, a gardener for the azaleas, and a cook for the barbecues. Faustin would never be at home, always at a meeting, a conference, or on a trip abroad. She would be buzzing with activity. She would belong to a cine club. Oh, not Euzhan Palcy again! Today we are showing Time Regained, a film by Raoul Ruiz.
Marcel Proust versus Joseph Zobel. That’ll take some doing!
She would also belong to a book club. Nothing trivial! This week we are reading Oran, langue morte by Assia Djebar. Subject for discussion: women and violence.
Painting would become a hobby. Out of pure coquetry she would show her canvases to close friends, who would politely scold her: “Why did you ever stop? You could have had a brilliant career!”
Can you see me, Fiela, in that sort of life?
Yet, despite the mockery, part of her began to dream of what she would never possess. Material well-being. Self-confidence. Peace of mind.
Oh, to leave Cape Town, to leave this country ravaged by violence and disease. To start one’s life all over again like making up a bed after a bad night’s sleep. The frightening thing is that you can never start life over again. Unhappiness, like happiness, is a habit formed at birth and impossible to break.
Dido came out of the kitchen to sit in the sun with them. Dido and Raymond were the best of friends. Both crazy about the same music. Both dreaming of an aseptic Africa, without garbage, vermin, or germs, where the carrier of the AIDS virus would meet the same fate as the tsetse fly. For the same reasons as Raymond, Dido was ecstatic. She had conveniently forgotten her reservations and warnings of the earlier days, elated by her friend’s lucky star. In short, Dido and Raymond were like overjoyed parents who had given up hope for a daughter way past her prime. As a result, anger inside Rosélie built up, swelled, and exploded, as deadly as the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
“I have,” she burst out, “no intention of following Faustin to Washington, D.C.”
Raymond paid no attention to this outburst. We all know how women like to put on airs and graces and proclaim the opposite of what they think. But Dido pounced on Rosélie, like a mother scolding her daughter.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
Rosélie was not used to confronting Dido, nor anyone else for that matter. This time, however, she persisted.
“I have said it over and over again. I will not leave Stephen alone here.”
Dido looked around her, stared at Raymond to call him as a witness, then thundered:
“And I will not let you sacrifice yourself for…for nothing.”
“For nothing?” exclaimed Rosélie, appalled.
Like Fina, Dido too was betraying her, reducing her sacred duty to childishness.
“Yes, for nothing!” yelled Dido.
We can only imagine what would have happened then if Deogratias, his daughter Hosannah, his wife, Sylvaine, and Bienheureux, their newborn baby, hadn’t arrived to pay Rosélie a courtesy visit, according to African custom. There is no way of predicting what irreparable words would have been exchanged. Instead of guessing what might have been, let us describe the scene that actually occurred. Bienheureux, thus named since his father read the Beatitudes every day, a lovely baby, aged four months and weighing thirteen pounds, was handed round while Rosélie, Dido, and Raymond pronounced those inane phrases babies tend to inspire.
“My God, he’s so cute!”
“He looks just like his papa and maman.”
“Give Auntie a smile, little man.”
Instead of which, Bienheureux began to cry. Sylvaine stuffed a breast in his mouth. Bienheureux gorged himself with milk, burped, and coughed up. Sylvaine wiped his mouth. Raymond, who had raised six children, showered her with advice. Dido too. After a while Dido went back to her kitchen. Raymond took his leave. A silence set in, since Sylvaine, Deogratias, and Rosélie had nothing to say to each other. After a reasonable duration Sylvaine said they had to go. They lived in Langa. The way back in an overcrowded bus would take forever. Once the young woman and her two children had left, Deogratias went into the garage to change his day uniform for his night uniform: a pair of padded khaki pants, a thick turtleneck pullover, and a woolen bonnet pulled down to his eyes. It was still too early to take up his position beneath the traveler’s tree. He leaned against the front gate, staring out at the street, greeting the other night watchmen arriving to take up their stations in the neighboring gardens. Most of them were French-speaking Africans, eating the stale bread of exile, having lost their land, their language, and their customs, and trying their hand at the harsh sonorities of a foreign idiom.
FIFTEEN
The proverb maintains: “The absent are always in the wrong.” The dead, absent for eternity, haven’t a chance to prove themselves right. Rosélie tossed and turned in bed. After Raymond left, she had gone into the kitchen, where Dido had calmed down. Her day now over, Dido too had changed clothes, endeavoring to resume the look of a woman of independent means. A dressmaker in Mitchell Plains, with the help of American catalogs, had made her a dark red pantsuit with wide lapels. Like Deogratias, she wore a woolen bonnet, but hers was elegantly crocheted. She was still a handsome woman who hadn’t given up looking for a companion. Up till now she had been more or less faithful to the memory of her late husband. But old age, which was creeping up fast, frightened her. She had set her heart on Paul, a coloured widower whose wife, a cousin of hers, she had taken care of before she died of cancer. She was not put off by his shortness or shyness. She had high hopes and paid no attention to the judicious advice of her sisters.
“Be gentler, less sure of yourself. Men are scared of women who wear the pants.”
She kissed Rosélie, then was gone, slamming the door like that of a closet where the skeletons could sleep in peace.
Dominique first of all. Then Fina. Ariel. Simone and her husband. Amy and Caleb. Alice and Andy. Olu Ogundipe. Mrs. Hillster. Rosélie made the roll call of those who had criticized Stephen as if summoning them to a tribunal. What were they accusing him of? Of hiding something, of being a despot, an insensitive, domineering manipulator, a racist even? All these accusations that drew a picture as sketchy as a police profile led her nevertheless to call into question their entire life together.
She got up and shivered in her nightdress for the air was cold. She hurriedly slipped on some clothes, and without switching on the light, she ran down the black mouth of the stairs. Deogratias had taken up his position on the patio, flooded in light by the streetlamp opposite. Muffled up in his padded quilt, he was snoring as usual and didn’t budge as she walked past, just as he hadn’t budged on that fatal evening a few months earlier. She went and pressed her nose against the bars on the front gate and looked around her.
What had happened that night?
Stephen had turned the key in the lock. The gate had creaked open in the silence. He had walked down the street. Two tomcats, back arched, had scampered round his feet, meowing and chasing each other. Left and right, the houses were silent. Everything slept except for the night watchmen, wrapped up like mummies on their folding chairs, their Zulu spears within hand’s reach. One of them had greeted him, while thinking to himself what a crazy idea to be out and about at such an hour.