“What does that represent, darling? Is it a person, a tree, or an animal?”
Those members of the family who had visited the Louvre museum in Paris once or twice shook with hysterical laughter. She thinks she’s that painter who was fascinated by Tahiti and also spent time in Martinique. What was his name?
In the eyes of Salama Salama, Rosélie’s penchant for painting was incomprehensible and exasperated him. Stephen’s behavior was radically different. She hadn’t been with him for three months before he began to take charge of her affairs, as he did with everything else. She lacked technique because painting is like singing, cabinet making, or masonry: it’s not something you make up, it is governed by rules. So he got her admitted to the National School of Beaux Arts, the latest gift from France to N’Dossou, a place of extreme material poverty but spiritually very rich. The two are not incompatible. On the contrary. The Antillean proverb is mistaken when it claims: Sak vid pa kienn doubout. In other words, those who have an empty belly are only preoccupied with filling it. Not at all, they are devoted to the creation of Beauty and Spirituality. A French government minister had inaugurated the school in great pomp a few months earlier. The director was a friend. Stephen had no trouble whatsoever.
N’Dossou’s entire population is no bigger than a district of Manhattan. Moreover, the entire country numbers fewer than a million inhabitants. The dense forest and fevers have got the better of it. The rumor quickly spread through the residential areas and suburbs that Rosélie had no business being where she was.
Favoritism! Favoritism!
Especially as she had no talent. Her paintings lacked that opacity generated by cultural authenticity. The professors, too busy saving up for their retirement, made no effort to defend her. Wounded by the criticism, Rosélie found no consolation in receiving her final diploma. Locked in her studio rented by Stephen in the Riviera IV district (everything an artist could wish for), next to the Afrika recording studios, she couldn’t touch her brushes for weeks on end. Nobody could reassure her that she was anything but a conscientious student. She would have liked words of encouragement from painters as different as Modigliani, Wifredo Lam, and Roberto Matta to admit her into their magic circle.
Am I nothing more than one of those tlacuilos, Indians from Ixmiquilpan who filled the Spanish with so much admiration?
Stephen in no way influenced Rosélie. He merely expressed his approval. Why did she always get the feeling he behaved like a doting daddy?
You know, those parents who consider their little darling’s daubings a masterpiece, frame it, and hang it on the wall.
He encouraged her to expose at the French Cultural Center, run by a friend of his, in between a sculptor from Niger and a watercolorist from Togo. The few visitors wrote admiring comments in the visitor’s book on the creativity of Francophone artists. Stephen hosted a dinner for the only two journalists in the country who specialized in painting. Since the evening was devoted to the arts, he also invited his inseparable Fumio. Fumio was a Japanese artist who staged an avant-garde show in front of a stunned audience, more used to the singers of the National Instrumental Ensemble, fully clothed in ceremonial wrappers. His was a one-man show called Ginza-Africa (Ginza being a trendy district of Tokyo), during which he completely stripped and threw a full frontal into the bargain. Although Fumio was of not much use that particular evening, the two journalists were impressed by the dishes served up by the former cook of the Finnish embassy, the high point being the crabs stuffed with snails. They published articles as excellent as the meal. As a result, Rosélie sold two of her paintings to the owner of the Hotel Paradiso, on the seafront, who hung them in the lobby and forced his reluctant guests to enthuse over them.
The color of the air changed. Rosélie stood up, followed by Manuel Desprez. Nowhere was safe nowadays. Only the day before yesterday a group of tourists had been attacked outside the District Six Museum. He offered to escort her home. Deep down she knew only too well what the neighbors would say if, three months after the death of Stephen, she came home with a white man.
I’m telling you, they’re all whores.
“Black and Asian women are alike, they’re machines, they can’t tell one man from another.”
Cowardly, Rosélie declined his offer.
“Can I come and see you one of these days?” he insisted.
She thought she hadn’t heard right. What type of Good Samaritan was this who took an interest in a morose, destitute widow of a left-handed marriage?
“I’d like to see your paintings,” he stammered, taken aback by her look of surprise. “As I told you, my sister has a gallery. Sometimes I work as an art dealer for her.”
Pity, nothing but pity!
As night fell a cool wind settled on their shoulders, a treacherous wind blowing in from the merciless Atlantic and Indian oceans, that swept through the streets, sending dust and grease papers flying. In the background, the massive Table Mountain, like an evil spirit, overshadowed the city.
Rosélie had been reluctant to move. She had sort of got used to New York. Why set off again? But Stephen was a stubborn man. Once he had something fixed in his mind, he was not afraid to make bold comparisons. After seven years in New York, he argued, to see South Africa after apartheid would be like going back in time. Going back to when the United States had just finished muzzling its police dogs and the fight for civil rights was over. They would have a front-row seat to observe how communities, once bitter enemies, learn how to live together. Apparently, in South Africa the experience was particularly remarkable. Not the slightest drop of blood spilled. But no agrarian reform either. No redistribution of land. No Africanization along the lines currently meant. In Durban, Jo’burg, and Cape Town the statues of the colonials remained firmly in place on horseback, just like in the good old days. Rosélie had been incapable of holding out against such an onslaught. She had laid her canvases, like recalcitrant schoolgirls, in boxes custom-made by a carpenter on 125th Street.
She hated Cape Town as soon as she left the airport, while sensing inside her a strange fascination. For towns are like humans. Their singular personality attracts, repels, or disconcerts. Cape Town possessed the brilliant sparkle and hardness of rock salt; its gardens and parks, the remarkable roughness of kelp. While Stephen admired pell-mell the mountains, the gnarled pines bent in two, the mass of flowers, the dazzling blue sky, and the endless expanse of ocean, she was blinded by both this splendor and the hideousness of the shacks that mushroomed all around her. No place had been more marked by its history. Never had she felt so denied, excluded, and relegated out of sight because of her color.
Outside the Victoria Cinema, the line was growing longer. A group of out-of-towners, recognizable by their antiquated dress, were chatting. Rosélie hurried on to avoid being struck down by their looks, then remembered with a start that she was alone. Stephen was no longer walking beside her, arm in arm, or ostentatiously placing an arm around her shoulder. They would not turn their heads in her direction. She no longer irritated, she no longer gave offense. She had become invisible. Sadly, she had to choose between being excluded or being invisible.
Invisible woman!
On Faure Street, Deogratias had already unrolled his mat at the foot of the traveler’s tree, but was not lying in that favorite position of his, on his left side, his checkered flannel blanket drawn up to his eyes. Myths die hard. Most experts agree that Deogratias’s ethnic group, the “descendants of a pastoral people,” are not really Negroid. Look at their height, their slender figure. Look at their aquiline nose in particular. A nose says everything. Deogratias had a flat nose. This did not prevent him from undergoing the same fate as his brothers of taller stature. He was waiting for Rosélie with a piece of news that made his Adam’s apple jump up and down. A fellow countryman had just arrived in Cape Town. A former government minister. What could he be up to? Rosélie ignored his excitability. Except for his speeches on the South Africans’ xenophobia, his only subject of conversation was the need to hunt down those who had destroyed so many lives, bring them before the international court of justice in Arusha and organize trials that would echo round the world like those at Nuremberg. This was the price to pay for Africa’s salvation. Together with Dido, Deogratias had been one of Rosélie’s first patients, well before she had thought of setting up business on her own. When Stephen had hired him, Deogratias was suffering from terrible nightmares. At times, lying under the traveler’s tree, he struggled with invisible torturers while his screams tore through the dark. Rosélie had taken care of him. She had been about to lose hope when his salvation came in the shape of Sylvaine, a young immigrant from the same ethnic group whom he had met at church. Sylvaine promptly gave him a daughter; the couple baptized her Hosannah in a shout of gratitude to the God who had reunited them. Although Rosélie had been extremely shocked, Stephen, as usual, had been more understanding.