When she emerged from the yard, a bus crowded with tourists was bumping down the lane. AFRICULTURAL TOURS was painted in gigantic letters on its side. Them again! It was their latest invention. The Ministry of Tourism had understood that what the privileged from the North want when they travel to Southern shores does not boil down to sun, sea, and safaris, guaranteed to include zebras and giraffes. As for the lions, they’re asleep. Can’t you see them over there? They also need thrills and chills, a new version of panem et circenses, a gut-wrenching retrospective scare.
Look, ladies and gentlemen, take a good look! Yes, you can take pictures with your digital cameras. It was on this exact spot that ten little niggers were shot during one of the ghetto’s most violent revolts. Their blood has irrigated the soil that has nurtured these wonderful flowers Brenda is giving you today.
Brenda’s Garden.
There was something in it for everybody. Brenda managed to make ends meet. The tourists satisfied their conscience and their curiosity.
SEVENTEEN
Flowers! Rosélie’s house was overflowing with them. Roses of every color. Gladioli. Irises. Arum lilies, anthuriums, and birds-of-paradise. An unexpected branch of mauve cineraria gave a pastoral touch. They must have cost a fortune. Delivered that morning by Interflora, they gave the room a slightly suffocating, formal atmosphere, reminiscent of Stephen’s funeral. They came with a message. Faustin informed her he was leaving for six months to supervise a tea-growing experiment in Indonesia. As a result, his move to Washington had been postponed.
What a lot of trouble he was going to! She had already understood.
In spite of these bland thoughts, her heart was in pieces. She went into the kitchen, where Dido was holding a mirror and putting the finishing touches on her makeup. While dabbing her cheeks with a bisque-colored powder, she glanced at Rosélie.
“Come with me,” she proposed, seeing her expression. “It’ll do you good.”
Rosélie had good reason to distrust Dido’s propositions. But anything was better than staying on her own on such an evening.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“To Hildebrand’s wedding, Emma’s little sister,” Dido replied, now thickly layering her eyelids with mauve. “Besides, you were invited, but you’ve forgotten.”
They took the bus, packed as usual. Any other crowd would have had a quiet laugh at this tall coloured woman, daubed like a carnival puppet with her heavy, showy jewels. But not this one. People got on, got off, stood up, sat down, silent and glum, without even turning their heads. Even the children, obediently holding their mother’s hand and looking like miniature adults, already had a funereal expression.
The wedding reception was being held in the section III village hall, the residential area of Mitchell Plains, the one modeled closest to a white district. In spite of its barbed wire, it was almost pleasant, with streets lined with leafy parasol trees. The hall had a rather welcoming aspect. At the entrance, hefty private security guards rigorously checked identity cards. It was not unusual for criminals to mix brazenly with the guests and rob them at gunpoint as the night wore on. The previous week, in the very middle of the Holiday Inn at Rondebosch, a white middle-class suburb, the wedding guests had been robbed, the women stripped of their jewelry and the men their wallets. A hothead who had tried to intervene had been shot dead in cold blood in front of everyone.
The wedding couple had gone to great lengths. The rotunda that could accommodate five hundred people had been repainted. Bunches of pink and white lilies bloomed in vases and amphoras. Multicolored lights twinkled beside Chinese lanterns. The buffet table, presided over by liveried waiters, hired for the occasion from Pepper and Vanilla, Cape Town’s most famous white caterer, was awash with food: piles of fruit, mangoes, papayas, grapes, mountains of cakes, salads, slices of avocado, gambas as big as your forearm, cuts of fresh and smoked salmon, chicken cooked in papillote, grilled meat, saffron rice, and whole roasted suckling pigs, whose combination of natural juices and spices emitted a suffocating smell that made Rosélie feel sick. Then there was the choice of vintage champagne, planter’s punch, sangria, scotch, and fizzy drinks. Dressed in red and wearing matching bandannas, the popular Prophets were playing on a stage at a deafening volume to the delight of the youngsters, who were already swaying their hips to the beat.
Two lives could not have been more different than those of Emma and Hildebrand, sisters nevertheless. Same father, same mother, as they used to say in N’Dossou. Like two life stories written by novelists of opposite temperaments. Whereas Emma suffered misfortune after misfortune, as we have described previously, Hildebrand was living a fairy tale. Having left school without even her primary school diploma, she had nevertheless found a job as an orderly in a private clinic. All day long, she cleaned and disinfected three floors of wards, changed piles of sheets and towels, and served meal trays to patients, unrewarding and exhausting work that she carried out with a smile, because nowadays what matters is to find a job. Anywhere, anyhow, and at whatever price. Four of her brothers were unemployed without benefits. It was then that the young Dr. Fredrik Vreedehoek, trained in London, had appeared to check the temperature of one of his patients. On seeing Hildebrand, demurely preoccupied with her cleaning products, his own temperature had risen dangerously. Three days later, he moved in with her. Five months later, he married her.
Coloured marriages are a complex business. It’s not just a matter of class and education, like everywhere else. Bourgeois with bourgeois. Graduates with graduates. Inheritances from parents or grandparents. Life insurance. Bank accounts. A plot of ground to build a house or a weekend cottage. In addition, it’s a question of skin color. The golden rule is not to marry anyone darker than yourself. If Hildebrand had been dark-skinned, Fredrik Vreedehoek would never have dreamed of slipping a wedding ring on her finger. Although heavily melanized over time, her family descended from Jan, who in November 1679 had set foot in Cape Town as head of the Dutch East India Company. Before he died, Jan had legitimized his fifty-eight illegitimate children with one sweep of his pen, and given his name to the Malagasy slave who for thirty years had groaned under his two hundred or so pounds without ever forgetting to call him baas at the moment of orgasm. But Hildebrand’s hair waved the color of a cornfield. Her complexion had the hue of maple syrup. Any prejudice against her melted under the glow of so much blondeness, which, failing family jewels or property, she would pass on to the child already showing up under her lace dress. However, it had been tacitly agreed that once the wedding festivities were over, the Vreedehoeks would cut all ties to this family, light-skinned perhaps, but without a penny. This left a bitter taste of mourning over the wedding celebrations. Hildebrand’s eyes filled with tears at the thought of never again embracing her beloved mama and papa, her brothers, sisters, young nephews, and Judith, her favorite niece. Her mother, rigged out in a puce-colored two-piece suit with leg-of-mutton sleeves, greeted the congratulations like condolences. As for Emma, she openly sobbed on Dido’s shoulder, overwhelmed by a new reason to hate life. She had raised Hildebrand and now, alas, she was going to lose her.
Dido dragged Rosélie to a table already occupied by some cousins and their teenage daughter, who was looking longingly at the dancers she wasn’t allowed to join. She wore patent-leather Mary Janes and a dress of white lace. Her hair was rolled into ringlets that danced black and shiny down her neck. Her mother boasted to anyone within hearing distance that she looked like Halle Berry.