Devoured by curiosity, the tenants had dispatched Angéline, who got by in French after four years at school. Unfortunately, the door of apartment 4B was firmly closed to her. Rosélie had barricaded herself in together with the rest of her story. However hard the neighbors spied, the door of number 4B never opened an inch and they had had to wait another week for GuidArt to clarify matters. Salama Salama, the famous singer, beloved by young and old alike, had been appointed Minister for Culture, a position that had been cruelly lacking in the entourage of the president. In his magnanimity, the president had given his seventh daughter to go with the job. Seven, a magic number. He had seventeen biological and seven adopted daughters. This daughter was one of his own. Plus as many sons, making forty-eight children in all. A photo on page three showed Salama Salama on the arm of a teenage girl swathed in yards of Alençon lace, swollen by an early pregnancy, for they had put the cart before the horse, something quite common nowadays. He himself was wearing tails. The couple were to spend their honeymoon in Morocco with the crown prince, son of our late friend the king.
The story was becoming clear. Betrayal. Cruel disappointment. For the second time Angéline was dispatched to the fourth floor. She finally managed to get in and scolded Rosélie, who had collapsed on the bed, her two trunks and box lying unopened beside her. She forced open not only the door of Rosélie’s apartment, but also her heart. She introduced her to Justine, Awu, Mandy, and Mariétou, and welcomed her into the band of women. Rosélie joined in the laughter, the repartee, pranks, and practical jokes that had been sorely missing in her solemn, solitary years as a young girl. Sometimes she thought of her family. Her father, who always thought himself the cat’s whiskers. What would Elie say if he saw her abandoned by her second-rate Bob Marley (already the choice of this unknown African musician had been the subject of volumes of abuse), in this city at the end of the world, in the company of these illiterate women? And Rose? For whom nothing was good enough for her daughter. And her uncles? With their pencil-sharp mustaches. And her aunts? Especially Aunt Léna, wrapped in her Creole jewelry. During the course of imaginary dialogues she tried to plead her case in front of this tribunal, and getting no encouragement, she ended up eliminating it entirely from her memory.
All this merriment, joking, and secret talk ended at six in the evening. Angéline and the band of women scurried home, where, armed with brooms and sponge mops, they would scrub, wash, iron, and cook, in other words carry out all those jobs assigned the female species since the world began. For dusk brought home the creatures who had been absent all day long: the men. The men, embittered by their makeshift jobs at the other end of the city. As soon as they returned home they vented their frustration and disappointment, and the residence La Liberté echoed with shouts and recriminations, the screams of battered women and the cries of terrified children. It was then that Rosélie cowardly took refuge in the serenity of the Saigon, savoring with Tran Anh the smell of green papaya.
The day arrived when, finishing a game of cards, she made the announcement to her companions. She was going to live with an Englishman, a university professor. In order to avoid getting sentimental she tried her hand at being cynical, something she ventured from time to time. A stroke of luck, no? She not only got love, but a roof over her head and food on the table. Nobody laughed. Her words were met with a silence of disbelief. Mariétou demanded an explanation. English is not a nationality, it’s a language. What was this all about? Rosélie explained, surprised deep down at her apologetic tone. Finally realizing what it actually meant, her girlfriends hurriedly withdrew, fleeing her like a leper. From that day on Rosélie found herself abandoned, her once inseparable companions now invisible, claiming they were too busy with their kids, their housework, or, even more unlikely, job hunting, for hoping and searching for a job in N’Dossou was like looking for a needle in a haystack. The day she left she was escorted by a cortege of children. They surrounded Stephen’s four-by-four, as solemn as if they were coffining a body. The older teenagers, admirers of Pelé—at that time Zinedine Zidane, like the lamb in the fable, was still at his mother’s breast or else swimming in the waters of her womb — stopped kicking their soccer ball to look daggers at her.
“What a place!” Stephen shivered.
As for Rosélie, she had tears in her eyes. A feeling of guilt was torturing her that was never to leave her in peace again. It was as if, irreversibly, she was cutting the ties of which she herself knew neither the nature nor the tenacity.
10:00 a.m.
Patient No. 7
Dawid Fagwela
Age: 73
Particularity: one of the few South African clients
Profession: retired miner
He was a former trade unionist who too had languished for years on Robben Island. The Ministry for Tourism had had the brilliant idea of retailoring his prison uniform and using him as a guide for the thousands of tourists who tramped through the concentration camp, heaving pitiful sighs at the sight of the tiny cell where Nelson Mandela, the exemplary hero, had been interned.
“How many years did he spend here?”
“Eighteen. He was then transferred to Pollsmoor to the south of Cape Town because he was a bad influence on the other prisoners.”
“Can we visit that prison as well?”
That’s all they thought about! Get as many pictures as possible for their photo albums. As for Dawid, the fact of reliving his abuse and torture day after day, and describing it down to the last detail to the inquisitive hordes in an endeavor to satisfy their curiosity, the poor guy was losing his head. It woke him up at night.
Was apartheid really over? Was he really free?
The hospital had kept him for several months and then diagnosed his case as incurable. His wife had refused this categorical diagnostic. Since Dido, her cousin, had spoken highly of Rosélie’s talent, she came to consult her. At first Rosélie hadn’t known what to do. This case was different. It’s not every day that a political prisoner turns into a tourist guide and travels from hell to paradise in a single lifetime. Then she got the idea of asking Dawid to record his memories on a tape recorder and write them down. Straightaway he plunged into the job from morning till night. No more time for the blues. Put his obsessions into words. Transform them into images. He planned on writing a book and had already found the title, the most difficult thing to find, according to Rosélie: “The True Confession of Lazarus, A Death Survivor.” He had regained his smile and his sleep, and was eating and drinking again.
Proof that sometimes writing does serve some purpose.
TWO
Rosélie only ventured out at the end of the day. Now that Stephen was gone, she, like the Catholics on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, religiously headed for the Mount Nelson Hotel, where he loved to take afternoon tea. It was a magnificent colonnaded building, one of the last remnants of the British Empire, the colossus with clay feet that had crumbled into dust, a living example of “grandeur and decadence.”