by Maryse Conde
Faure Street: Inspector Lewis Sithole was waiting for her, leaning against the traveler’s tree, poring over the Cape Tribune that Olu had censured. He lost no time with polite conversation and, folding the paper, got straight to the point.
“I was right in thinking your husband didn’t just go out to buy cigarettes. Thanks to your cooperation, by giving us his mobile phone, we have proof that he received a call at zero hours seventeen minutes.”
Seventeen minutes past midnight?
Stephen would never let himself be disturbed in the middle of the night. It must have been a mistake, a wrong number. Things like that happen!
Inspector Lewis Sithole went on as if her interruption were not worth stopping for.
“We had no trouble finding where the call came from. A public telephone booth. This confirms our suspicions that the caller was not taking any chances and did not want to call from home.”
What story was this he was imagining? Yet another one who had missed his calling! He should have been writing detective stories. And where was this famous telephone booth?
“In Green Point.”
“Green Point?” Rosélie repeated, stunned.
Neither she nor Stephen had friends in this suburb, a paradise for students and backpackers, which had nothing to offer but cheap hotels. It regularly made front-page news because of its high crime rate. Nothing very sophisticated, however: muggings, burglaries, and passersby beaten up for a few rand.
Lewis Sithole stared at her.
“You know no one who lives in this neighborhood?”
She shook her head. He didn’t push the matter and said in a strange voice, both reassuring and threatening:
“Never mind. We’ll find him, this mysterious caller.”
Who would want to kill Stephen? Though certainly no saint in a stained-glass window, he had been a dispenser of good works. He wrote hundreds of letters of recommendation for his students. He lent considerable sums of money to his young colleagues. He would involve himself and his time personally. In New York he paid daily visits to Mount Sinai hospital, where a Jane Austen specialist was dying from cancer of the larynx. He who hated children was prepared to take in the twins of an assistant who was trying to finish her thesis on Mary Wollstonecraft by the end of the year. He gave free English lessons to Haitian, Puerto Rican, and Senegalese associations.
Inspector Lewis Sithole had no sooner left than Dido arrived with her inevitable tray of coffee.
“What’s he on about again?” she grumbled.
Rosélie didn’t have the courage to repeat his wild imaginings and merely recounted her day’s misadventures, then looked her straight in the eyes.
“You didn’t like Stephen very much, did you?”
Dido rolled her hazel eyes and stared at a point in the distance.
“Me, not like Stephen? Oh, come on!” she protested.
After a few moments, since Rosélie’s silence demanded an answer, she reluctantly confessed.
“No, I didn’t like him. He was an egoist and a despot. He prevented you from being yourself.”
Myself?
But who am I? What beast, what flesh-eating fish? My teeth are pointed and my tongue is forked. Sometimes I can be seen swallowing in one gulp the insects attracted to my sweet smell. The bats are my sisters: half rat, half bird; ill at ease in the glare of daylight. We spend our time hanging upside down, seeking the dark that will take us back to the womb that bore us.
Elie and Rose never stopped thanking the Good Lord for their kind, sweet daughter, their only consolation in the shipwreck of their marriage. Without Rosélie they would have separated a long time ago. But in our family there must be no child of a divorce. A little girl needs a papa and a maman in order to grow up, even if they do hurl insults at each other day in and day out. The quarrels of Elie and Rose took a Homeric turn. She accused him, a mulatto as poor as a church mouse, of marrying her for the hundred acres of land Ebenezer, her father, had sown with fruit trees under the sun in Gourbeyre and for the houses he rented out just about everywhere on the island. Elie retorted that Ebenezer had stolen the property from some poor wretch. Maybe his own family was poor, but at least it was honest.
Rosélie never raised her voice. Never disobeyed, never rebelled. No preadolescent crisis, much less an adolescent one. The family cited her as an example to the cousins who got into bad ways. The school mistresses were less enthusiastic: “In class, she dreams. She sleeps standing up.” The art teacher in particular complained: “You should see her free compositions. Hideous! The other day she drew a woman with legs wide open spurting a stream of blood. I shouted: ‘Good Lord, what’s that?’ ‘It’s a rape,’ she replied. ‘Have you ever seen a rape?’ I asked her angrily. ‘Those sorts of things don’t happen around here.’ She replied: ‘I’m raped every day.’ And when I shouted in anger: ‘Don’t say such things! Who rapes you?’ She answered quite calmly: ‘My papa, my maman, everyone.’”
ELEVEN
Fiela, what have they got against him? He has always been by my side. Thoughtful. Considerate. Patient to my moods.
Often Stephen used to say:
“You are the most wonderful woman on earth. An extraordinary gift, too precious for me, like the ones my grandmother used to give me. My father and mother were so fraught with hate for each other they had no time for me. I grew up amid their indifference. So every Christmas my grandmother would decorate a tree in which she nestled little trumpets, little violas, violins, guitars, and bagpipes. She would switch on garlands of electric lights. On the branches she hung silver and gold balls that sparkled from the light. Then underneath she placed my present, wrapped in festive paper that I tore open when we got home from Midnight Mass. I can remember one year it was a white clown almost as tall as I was. When you pulled the strings it smiled and croaked, waving its arms: “Hi, how are you?” My grandmother died when I was ten. Shortly afterward my parents divorced. I followed my mother to Verberie and life never again gave me anything. Except you!”
Or else he would say:
“If I were to lose you, my life would revert to the desolate existence I led before I met you. I had nothing that was mine. I lived thanks to other men. Like a Tupinamba Indian I devoured their liver, their spleen, and their heart. But these bitter feasts left me even more despondent. Sated, I realized my baseness. You gave me everything.”
For their first Christmas together, he had wanted to take her on a journey. A real one. Because he realized that traveling for Rosélie meant only two things.
Either the drive from La Pointe to Basse-Terre. This was the time when she was a little girl and Rose still showed herself in public, when they would get up at four in the morning. The sky glowed pale over the hill of Massabielle as Elie, helped by Meynalda, loaded the Citroën with bottles of water, Tupperware containers of codfish fritters and curried chicken. Then the family would confront the perilous fifty-mile journey to attend a christening or a wedding.
Or else the journey by plane from La Pointe to Paris for her studies, for the Thibaudins considered Paris nothing more than a city where you were likely to find work. Neither Elie nor Rose was one of those fanatics who count up their stays in the metropole year after year and return home starry-eyed. In fact, Rose had only traveled once to the capital for her honeymoon. Her head had been ringing with the carnival songs of Cuba, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador da Bahia. But how do you get to those places? Elie had no idea. One of his brothers had recommended a cheap hotel in Paris with furnished rooms and a kitchenette where you could do your cooking. The Hotel des Deux-Mondes stood on the place Denfert-Rochereau, a busy shopping district. Rose would walk round the statue of the Lion of Belfort, green as the mirage of grass in the middle of the desert sands, and continue on to the narrow rue Daguerre, overflowing with food stalls. There she would rub shoulders with other housewives and bargain for tuna, scorpion fish—similar to the red snapper—red peppers, and violet-colored eggplant. Madly in love with his young bride, who weighed n
o more than 130 pounds and whose voice rivaled that of the kiskadee bird from Dominica, Elie had not been mean with his money throughout their stay. He had taken her to see films starring Tino Rossi, whom she adored and whose hit songs she sang:
Marinella, oh reste encore dans mes bras,
Avec toi, je veux jusqu’au jour
Chanter cette chanson d’amour.
He showed her the Folies Bergère and the Moulin Rouge, but she was shocked by the dancers and thought they were little better than the ladies of easy virtue back home, showing off their legs and their breasts. Once, he was in the mood for a bit of culture and bought orchestra seats to a matinee performance at the Théâtre de l’Odéon of Corneille’s Le Cid, which they used to recite at school.
Rose was bored in Paris. She returned home to Guadeloupe, determined never to travel again, and with the help of her illness, she kept her word.
Stephen chose Italy. He was astounded that the only museum Rosélie had visited as a child on Saturday afternoons under the supervision of her French teacher was the Lherminier Museum, a pretty colonial house with wrought-iron balustrades. All it housed were collections of faded postcards, lace and mother-of-pearl fans, and children’s spinning tops. But it was the only museum in La Pointe. Rosélie got to know the museums in Paris much later when she was a student. Stephen couldn’t get over it.
“When did you feel you had a vocation?”
Vocation? Rosélie was incapable of giving an answer. A child does not have a vocation. She wants to paint. Period. It’s her caprice and her freedom to choose. She had entered into painting like a novice enters into religion. Without suspecting what lay in wait for her. Uncertainty. Fear. Solitude. Exhausting work. Lack of money and self-esteem. The search for recognition.
“You’re a miracle,” Stephen marveled. “You’ve reinvented painting.”
Florence and Rome appalled Rosélie. She thought Art was a delectation enjoyed by the happy few. An elitist and outmoded notion. It is fodder for senior citizens, corporate employees, and underprivileged children. White-haired tourists and schoolchildren elbowed one another around the Uffizi and crowded onto the Ponte Vecchio. Paper litter, African priests, and Indonesian nuns fluttered around the square in front of St. Peter’s.
The brightly colored grotesques daubed on the ceilings of the convents and libraries in Parma, and Venice, especially Venice, despite its hordes, reconciled her to Italy. The city of the Doges drifted on the waters of a lagoon the color of the Sargasso Sea. Ocean liners, reviving the journeys of long ago, were escorted lazily out to sea. Rosélie dragged Stephen along alleyways off the beaten path, into obscure churches and hidden monasteries. And that’s how she came across Antonio Vivaldi. One evening, out of curiosity, they followed a small crowd into a patio cluttered with chairs and benches open to an indigo sky. They were giving a private concert, a common sight in the city. The concertgoers all knew one another and kissed and hugged with that Latin effusiveness. They made room for the strangers, turning round to whisper and stare. Yet this open display of curiosity was as vivifying as a hot bath. One man came up to them. Was the signorina from Ethiopia? Ignoring her negative answer, he began talking about Ethiopia. Or rather about himself in Ethiopia, since people only talk about themselves. For years he had worked with a team from Doctors Without Borders. He missed those isolated villages shivering in the icy mornings and the bitter breeze where he had treated the living as emaciated as the dead. Since his return to Italy, life had lost its meaning.
“And what about Art? And Culture?” Stephen asked in surprise. “You must have missed them in Ethiopia, you who are so blessed in this country.”
Art? Culture? He shrugged his shoulders.
Obviously he shared the view of a contemporary writer who had twice failed to win the Goncourt Book Prize: “Art and culture are necessary compensations for the misfortune of our lives.”
There was silence as the orchestra sat down. In the warm night air, thick with humidity from the nearby sea, Andreas Scholl began to sing the Stabat Mater by Vivaldi. Thus began the passion between Rosélie and the maestro of Venice. The passion for music differs from the passion you feel for a human being because it never disappoints you.
Domineering? Manipulating?
Stephen also watched over her and took her in his arms on nights when remorse gripped her in its persistent and steadfast embrace like on the very first day. He was never tired or exasperated. He made her drink when she was feverish with remorse, sponging her forehead and kissing her hands.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” he reassured her.
Nothing to be ashamed of? Judge for yourselves.
December was drawing to a close. Flanked by the inevitable Andrew, they had not only spent Christmas in Scotland and eaten haggis, but also relived the trip George Orwell made in the dangerous waters of the Gulf of Corryvreckan. Like Orwell’s boat, theirs had capsized and they had almost drowned. They had scarcely recovered from their fright when there came the call from Aunt Léna.
They hurriedly flew to London. But Stephen had kissed Rosélie good-bye at Gatwick, giving a hundred reasons why he couldn’t accompany her. She was no dupe. Nobody can confront the death of a mother.
Rose’s condition had not worsened. Simply, the heart, her poor heart, prisoner of layers of fat, no longer had the strength to pump blood to her brain and vital organs, which were failing. One evening, Meynalda, who slept in Rose’s room to check on her breathing, as reedy as a premature baby’s, thought it had stopped. The room was deathly silent, as the saying goes. Dr. Magne was sent for and certified that, from all appearances, she was still alive. In the morning she was still hanging on. Obviously something was holding her back in her place of misfortune: she was waiting for her daughter before closing her eyes.
And Rosélie took fright, imagining her mother’s long-suffering, obstinate gaze filtering through her swollen eyelids. How could she confront her? She hadn’t been back for three years under the flimsiest of excuses: the move to New York, a study trip by Stephen to Hawaii, and a bout of flu. To make amends, she had spent a fortune at Interflora for every occasion, knowing full well that these expensive bouquets of flowers could not hide the real reason.
On arrival at Orly-Ouest, it was raining. It always rains in Paris. Where is the City of Lights?
I see a damp and melancholic city. Under the Mirabeau Bridge, the waters of the Seine churn our memories, gray and heavy like drowned corpses.
Suddenly, the little courage she had mustered melted away. Her legs went weak, her eyes blurred with tears, and her strength failed her. There was no way she was going to dash to Roissy to catch her plane to Guadeloupe. She dived into a taxi and drove to the Porte Saint-Martin, a district that for her always symbolized desolation.
Hotel du Roi-Soleil. Rooms by the month and by the day.
“For how many days?”
I don’t know, I don’t know.
The room looked out onto a narrow street, a sort of dead end. The electric light, as glaring as an operating room’s, lit up a reproduction by Vincent van Gogh. Rosélie ordered two bottles of scotch and, for a person who didn’t drink, emptied both of them.
When she resurfaced it was night.
Through the window the neon signs for cheap hotels flashed red-green-green-red. A pneumatic drill was hammering her head while a plug of steel wool choked her mouth. She nevertheless managed to get up and leave the room. To call the elevator. To walk straight as she passed reception. To reach the sidewalk. It was still raining. The Ghanaian whores, feminine silhouettes lined up in the shadows of the sidewalk among the garbage cans, asked one another in Ewe:
“Where does the sister come from?”
“Don’t she look like a Malian?”
She entered a café. Soon a man accosted her. Nothing macho, just a young, fair-haired boy, probably a soldier on leave who had smelled a weak, helpless individual. Not long afterward they were back in her room, where he undressed, revealing a white, milky skin
with no hair, few muscles, and a limp sex of enormous length. She opened her mouth. He fondled her breasts. But when he was about to penetrate her she collapsed. Who says that men have only a one-track mind and take unfair advantage of women?
Not Lucien Degras. Twenty-four and unemployed since he had left technical college. Ah yes, such is the lot of the majority in our postmodern societies. He listened to this stranger and took pity on her. Three days and three nights she raged delirious in his arms. She left no subject untouched: Rose’s mysterious illness, Elie’s infidelities, her flight and her fears. On the morning of the fourth day, he managed to drag her to a travel agency—L’Agence Hirondelle, Wings Around the World.
By noon he had paid a taxi for her out of his own money, for he had just received his unemployment check. Direction Roissy.
Eight hours later she arrived in La Pointe. The journey had been a nightmare. Babies crying. Children running up and down the aisles. Mothers desperately trying to quiet things down. Fathers calmly reading their papers in the midst of the hubbub. The family had dispatched Aunt Léna to the airport, her face furrowed with reproach. She kissed Rosélie on the forehead without saying a word and took the wheel of an old car she had inherited from Papa Doudou. During the bumper-to-bumper drive to the rue du Commandant Mortenol—there are too many cars on this wretched island!—they didn’t exchange a word. Not one question, such as where were you? Not one reproach, such as she’s been waiting for you for four days. Oh yes, she’s waiting for you.
Rose was lying on her bed, her eyes half open.
When Rosélie entered they widened, stared at her, letting fly those darts, those arrows that would bore into her heart, her mind and soul, rainy season come dry season, at any hour of the day or night; then they rolled upward and glazed over.