She went up to her and murmured:
“Why did you do it?”
Fiela stared at her and said reproachfully:
“You’re asking me? You’re asking me?”
The sounds that came out of her mouth were guttural, very low, and startling like those of an instrument out of tune.
“I did it for you! For you!”
Thereupon Rosélie woke up, soaked in sweat, her nightdress stuck to her back like in one of her childhood fevers.
The moon shamelessly displayed her belly of a pregnant woman.
SIXTEEN
When she showed up again in his office, Olu Ogundipe had that worried look of someone who has sighted a hurricane looming on the horizon. Yet Rosélie had nothing threatening about her. Instead she was rather shattered and slumped into an armchair. Around her on the walls, all of Olu’s beloved heroes stared down at her fixedly. Always the same reproach. What had she done for the Race?
“What have you come to give me this time?” Olu said mockingly, not at all hostile. “Another computer?”
She didn’t answer, tortured by a sudden urge to burst into tears. He was quick to see it and took an even softer stand.
“I was about to leave. My wife isn’t too well, it’s her allergies, I have to go and pick up my older children from school. Would you like to come with me? We can have tea at my place.”
She hesitated, and once again he poked fun at her.
“You’re a pretty woman. But this isn’t a trap. We know how to behave. Do we frighten you?”
Telling him that she hadn’t always been the mistress of a white man and that her first partner had been an African would serve no purpose. The stereotypes about Antillean women die hard. They are supposed to hate and despise Black Skins. Rosélie hadn’t the energy to put up a fight and she let him talk away.
“I know the Caribbean. I lived for three years in Kingston and came up against all sorts of humiliations. I’ve nothing against my in-laws. Admirable people. But Cheryl’s family and friends accused her of soiling her sheets with a nigger, black like me. If we ourselves don’t like our color, how can we blame the whites for not liking it?”
All this time he was signing a dozen letters with a majestic flourish.
They went out and crossed the deserted recreation yards that echoed with students’ voices from every classroom, chanting lessons and singing a cappella. The sounds merged and composed an unexpected and appealing polyphony.
Olu got onto his favorite subject of conversation: the future of South Africa.
“You’d think Césaire had this country in mind when he wrote The Tragedy of King Christophe. Do you remember? ‘So here we are at the bottom of the ditch! The very bottom of the ditch! I’m talking of a spectacular ascent!’ I think it’s the most wonderful piece of theater. What do you think?”
Rosélie had only read Notebook of a Return to My Native Land by Césaire, which Salama Salama recited by heart. He dreamed of putting it to rap, cleverly beating out the lines:
“Get lost I said you cop face, you pig face, get lost, I hate the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Go away bad grigri, bedbug of a monklet.”
In the end, the fear of sacrilege stopped him.
Without being disheartened by so much ignorance, Olu continued.
“Give us a few more years and we’ll be the leaders of Africa! I’m not talking only in economic terms, gross national product, gross domestic product, but in terms of culture.”
Art and culture are necessary compensations for the misfortune of our lives. (Once again.)
They reached the car. The ageless Nissan uttered a series of coughs and started up. The cheerful aspect of the school, a Catholic day school, made it look out of place in the general landscape. Olu’s older children turned out to be three kids of an unexpected coffee color ranging from nine to twelve years. They spontaneously held up their cheeks for Rosélie to kiss and she was filled with emotion by such a gesture. It was as if they, the children, absolved her and were giving her back the place the adults had excluded her from.
Olu lived in Esperanza, a district still under construction on the outskirts of Cape Town. Neither township nor residential suburb. Its inhabitants belonged to the laboring middle class trying to emerge from the ashes of apartheid. His villa, like all the others, was surrounded by a concentration camp — type wall, topped by thick rows of barbed wire. And behind, you could hear the barking of hounds, straining furiously on their chains.
“Gangs operate around here,” he explained. “Loafers and good-for-nothings who don’t want to do a day’s work. Let’s not close our eyes, there’s a lot to be done. I’ll quote once more The Tragedy of King Christophe: We are ‘schoolteachers brandishing a ruler in the face of a nation of dunces!’”
A nation of dunces? Did Césaire say that? Not a very nice remark!
Three other small boys, again coffee colored, ranging this time from four to six years, were playing in a patch of garden. They broke off to hurl themselves on their father with Sioux-like yells, then, in a charming ensemble, held up their warm cheeks for Rosélie, who, this time, almost burst into tears. The living room looked like Olu’s office, but more chaotic. The leather sofa and three armchairs were streaked with scratch marks, the Moroccan rug lay crooked. The same dusty photos. In their frames the great men, now dust to dust, struck a sorry pose. Okay, they left behind their books. But who reads them? What is their legacy?
Nobody reads anymore. Everyone watches American sitcoms on television.
My favorite: Sex and the City.
Olu was proud of a set of snapshots placed on top of the inevitable piano in petty bourgeois interiors, between the inevitable bunch of artificial flowers.
“You see,” he said, priding himself, “that’s Césaire and me at Saint-Pierre in Martinique. This is Césaire and Cheryl. He liked her a lot. And here we are all three of us, Césaire, Cheryl, and me, at Le Diamant. Behind us the famous rock. Do you know Martinique?”
Rosélie shook her head. In the Caribbean she only knew Kingston, Jamaica, where she had gone with Salama Salama to a reggae festival. She didn’t remember much about this paradise turned hell on earth under the combined effects of crack and ganja. They had been advised to stay in their suite at the Sheraton because of the violence. She had lived in a cloud of smoke and only went out to lie by the pool in the shape of a peanut. When Salama Salama wasn’t around, a barman from the Dominican Republic served her trujillos, an explosive mixture of rum, lemon, cane syrup, and tomato juice with a dash of Marie Brizard, while leering at her breasts. According to Salama Salama, his concert, which she hadn’t attended, had been a triumph.
“I’ve been to Trinidad, Montserrat, Antigua, and Barbados,” he bragged again. “Haiti is my favorite island. The most African, the only one of its kind, you could say. That’s where I really felt at home. You know what the Haitians call a man, whatever his color? A Nègre. The day will come when Noirisme, that theory they’ve so distorted, will be rehabilitated.”
Then he disappeared to look after his wife, leaving Rosélie faced with a lukewarm glass of Lipton teabags served up by a domestic in none-too-clean overalls. Large families live in an atmosphere of disorder created by the children — toys lying about on the rugs, teatime remains left on the table, and a constant noise of squabbling, tears, and cries, things that stab at the heart of the lonely. Sitting in this unattractive room where the windows covered by a grid of solid bars let in little light, Rosélie had never felt so vulnerable. She was reminded of the tribe she had grown up in, on days spent at the beach with aunts, uncles, and cousins. It required half a dozen cars to transport everyone, dozens of hampers to carry all the food, and at least three iceboxes for the drinks. Rose, of course, didn’t accompany them. No question of undressing in public ever since a little nephew had compared her in a fit of laughter to Bibendum, the Michelin Man. But Elie was there, trim and muscular, swimming agilely in his striped swimming trunks.