Once she had made this decision, a sense of serenity enfolded her, like a sick person who has long hesitated, then resigned herself to undergo an operation. Either she will die. Or her life will be spared. In either case, the suffering will stop.
She decided to go home.
The last noisy groups of customers were leaving Ernie’s and the remaining few restaurants still open. This district of Cape Town used to be out of bounds to blacks. In order to have access you needed a pass. Judging by the looks that bored into her, her presence was still out of place and a threat even today. If they had guns, these young people would use them. In all impunity. Justice would acquit them like it acquitted the four police officers who assassinated Amadou Diallo in New York. Legitimate defense. A black man is always guilty.
But of what?
Of being black, of course!
Precisely, a group was standing at a street corner.
She became scared, turned her back, and almost began to run; then got hold of herself and walked back up the street. When she arrived level with them, she confronted them. A crowd of youngsters, almost teenagers. Squeezed into leather jackets. The boys wore their hair in a crew cut; the girls in a ponytail. Harmless. Their minds were on other things. The boys thinking how best to persuade the girls to come back to their place, and the girls wondering if it was still worth hanging on to what remained of their virginity.
As Stephen used to lament, once again she was making a song and dance about nothing.
She reached Faure Street.
She resolutely pushed open the door to Stephen’s study. This was the second time she had entered since he died. While he was alive, she hadn’t gone in very much either. Neither had Dido, who, with broom and vacuum cleaner, complained bitterly that she was kept out. She flipped the switch and the light flooded the paintings, the books packed against the walls, the sagging armchair, the heavy desk and its disparate ornaments: a Tiffany lamp, a miniature globe, and a stone paperweight from Mbégou. It was as if the room, motionless and silent, were waiting for its owner to return. As if Stephen’s restless personality were still palpitating. It was here he worked for hours on end amid a din of jazz turned up full volume — which always amazed Rosélie — where he read and watched his beloved opera videos. Rosélie had always felt that this part of his life rejected her. That she was not welcome. The attention diverted to her wretched self distracted him from higher preoccupations. She had none of the qualities to rival James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, or Synge. For the very first time she wondered what other interests, perhaps even less noble, absorbed him.
You don’t improvise being a voyeur, however. It’s not like an old pair of jeans you slip on whenever you want to. It has to be ingrained.
She was no sooner inside than a deep malaise gripped her. It seemed she was committing an indiscretion. That Stephen would come in at any minute and ask her, amused:
“What are you looking for?”
Yes, what was she looking for?
An icy cape settled around her shoulders. She was ashamed of herself. She was no better than a grave robber. She knew Stephen threw his keys into a Mexican pot on the window ledge. But when she was at the point of opening the drawers, she lost her nerve. The bunch of keys slipped from her hands and rolled onto the carpet. She quickly switched off the light and dashed outside.
She sat for a moment in the garden. Not a sound. In the distance a few cars rattled up the avenue. She went back up to the haven of her bedroom, put on her nightdress again, and went back to bed. The bed was cold. Cold and empty. She thought of Faustin and burst into tears, not knowing whether she missed him or Stephen more.
Rosélie seldom cried. Tears are a luxury that only children and the spoiled can afford. They know that a sympathetic hand is always there to dry them. She hadn’t cried when Salama Salama cheated on her. She hadn’t cried when she stood in front of her mother’s body, eyelids finally closed, guarded by candles at the bottom of Doratour the undertaker’s monstrous casket. She hadn’t cried when Stephen died.
There hadn’t been a wake. Rough handled back from the morgue midmorning by mindless coffin bearers, the heavy oak casket had been laid to rest in the middle of the living room, gradually smothered in wreaths from the university, schools, neighbors, and anonymous sympathizers. Around noon, they no longer knew where to put them. They were piled up in scented heaps just about anywhere. Emotions were running high in the rooms on the ground floor and in the garden, where people — mostly whites, but also some blacks — students, musicians, and artists who had known and loved Stephen, were praying side by side.
Nkosi Sikelei Afrika.
Yes God, bless this country. Forgive it the terrible things that go on here!
The head of the funeral cortege reached the church while the end of it was still filing past the Mount Nelson Hotel. Many of the mourners remained outside in front of the church before setting off for the cemetery.
There was a crowd too for Rose’s funeral. But it was different in her case. With its merciful scythe death had cut short the years of suffering and exclusion. As for Stephen, it had been shockingly unjust, striking down a man, still young in years, talented and beloved by all. On each occasion, Rosélie walked behind the coffin with a mechanical stride, not a tear in her eye and a face so bone dry it was as if she had no feelings. Consequently, nobody took pity on her.
That night, however, she cried. With tears that welled up from a never-ending source deep within her. It was like the rain on certain days during the rainy season when it begins in the predawn hours, slows down in the evening only to pour even harder in the darkness stretching to infinity, and continues until morning. The rivers then overflow their bed and the whole island smells of mud and mustiness. This constant patter of rain finally sent her to sleep with a dream. Or rather a succession of dreams, nightmares in fact, one after the other, exterior day, exterior night, like sequences in a film without words or music.
It was daylight. Was she in Guadeloupe? Or in Cape Town? The crowd was gone. The cemetery was empty. The raging sun was heating the great steel plate of the ocean. At intervals, birds of prey swooped out of the sky onto their quarry, visible only to them through the molten metal. She was looking for a grave. Her mother’s? Stephen’s? But however much she walked up and down the paths, turning right, then left, she couldn’t find it. Suddenly, everything around her disappeared. She was lost in a desert of sand and dunes. Nothing but dunes. Nothing but sand. Nothing but sand. Nothing but dunes. Overhead, the calotte of sky was shrinking and the raving maniac in its middle continued to pound even harder.
It was night. She was lost in a forest as dense as N’Dossou’s. Not a single hut. Only tree trunks, eaten by moss and epiphytes, their branches smothered in moving creepers like the arms of a giant. Suddenly, the trunks got closer and closer. They squeezed and crushed her while the boa vines wrapped themselves around her body.
It was daylight. The footpath wound through the grass, which promptly parted in front of her. Nature reigned supreme, everything in its place. The sun way up above, pouring down its usual dose of molten lead. The cottony white clouds, stuck to the blue by the heat. On the horizon, the rigid, triangular-shaped mountains. Suddenly the path turned at a right angle. A farm stood out against a quadrilateral of gnarled vines, planted at regular intervals like crosses. Closer to her was a cornfield. A woman was waiting, angular in her black dress, leaning against the tin siding of the main building. When Rosélie walked up, the woman turned her head and Rosélie recognized her. It was Fiela!
Fiela was wearing an open-neck blouse, as if she were going to the guillotine. Her tiny slit eyes and her face, with its triangular-shaped cheekbones, betrayed no sign of fright. No sign of remorse either. In actual fact, no feeling. It was one of those impenetrable faces that disconcert ordinary people. Rosélie thought she was seeing her twin sister, separated from her at birth and found again fifty years later, like in a bad film.