The Story of the Cannibal Woman

THIRTEEN

Every couple who goes through a crisis imagines that travel will provide a miracle cure. That’s what they call an idée reçue. They believe that seeing new landscapes, meeting new people, and learning a foreign language is an infallible cure for their distress. Stephen and Rosélie were no different. In early summer, Stephen proposed they leave. Europe? Africa? Asia? He himself was in favor of Japan. For a long time Fumio had given him the desire to know this country, a little more than by the sushi bars in Soho or the Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes, which he had read dozens of times.

Rosélie refused, still smarting from her wounds to risk curious or racist looks flung full in her face or as a stab in the back. Despite Stephen’s loathing for the beach, a stay in Montauk on Long Island had to make do. Montauk is what the East Coast has that is closest to a village. No movie theater. A drugstore where sleeping pills are shelved side by side with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Wooden houses strung out along miles of beach. The ocean and the sky stretching to infinity. In Rosélie’s eyes, the sea at Montauk, like the English Channel, had nothing in common with that coquette with green eyes who, picking up her lace petticoats, sashays into the bays of Guadeloupe or seethes against its reefs. It was dull and lifeless, strewn here and there with tufts of foam clinging to her colorless garb. Nothing elating. Swimming was anything but exhilarating.

Whereas she had trouble getting over Ariel, La América, and the sound and fury of adultery, Stephen recovered extremely quickly and extremely well. He had become friends with a group of rugged men wearing yellow oilskins and sou’westers who initiated him in deep-sea fishing. Every morning he would get up at dawn and return in the evening loaded with swordfish and marlin that slowly decomposed in the fridge, since Rosélie had always loathed fish and its tasteless, anemic, strong-smelling flesh. When he was not out at sea, he would go and drink mugs of beer at the local tavern with his newfound friends. We must admit that, to his credit, unlike his companions he never got drunk, and came home around midnight, fully sober and not bawling “My Funny Valentine.”

One day a brunette, her pretty face crowned by a powder puff of curly hair, called out to Rosélie over the hedge and proposed they go for a swim. The invitation stunned her, especially as the other holidaymakers carefully avoided her. At the supermarket they would go out of their way not to find themselves in front of the basmati rice shelf at the same time as her. The stranger was called Amy Cohen, her husband, Caleb. They had three sons. They were Jews.

What is a Jew? Jean-Paul Sartre posed the question in Anti-Semite and Jew. Did he answer the question? Like every teenager, Rosélie had received The Diary of Anne Frank as a birthday present together with Wuthering Heights. She had read Emily Brontë’s tale over and over again, much to Rose’s surprise, since she could never get Rosélie interested in a novel, but she had never opened the Anne Frank. During endless discussions by Stephen and his colleagues, she had heard some maintain the Jews were victims turned perpetrators, while others claimed they were victims fighting for their survival. She was certain of one thing, though: they wore the yellow star as a mark of their singularity and exclusion, like her. Amy described to her journeys that, although they hadn’t taken place in the hold of a slave ship, were nevertheless wrenching experiences. Fleeing fires and pogroms, hunted from one Central European country to another, her family had stopped in Vienna long enough for her grandfather, who was a violinist, to play in Aïda for the inauguration of the Wiener Staatsoper. Then they were on the run again. This time, for safety’s sake, they had crossed the ocean and taken refuge in America. But that was where any resemblance to the naked migrants Rosélie knew, stopped. Amy’s father had invented a fake mother-of-pearl for making shirt buttons that had made him rich. In a just twist of fortune his sons preferred music to shirt buttons, and the five boys played in the various city orchestras. Only Amy had decided to devote her life to her family. She left university without graduating, and ever since, her days were reduced to mashing vegetables into puree, filling babies’ bottles with bottled water, and getting rid of foul-smelling diapers.

“Motherhood is the noblest of functions,” she would say, up to her eyes in poop. “Alas, ever since the feminists, it has been discredited. It makes me furious!”

Rosélie, usually not very bold, was bold enough to come out with Stephen’s famous axiom: “The most beautiful creations are those of the imagination.” Amy’s children, in fact, scared her. Three famished, howling children like vultures gorging on their mother’s liver and entrails. Unperturbed, Amy smiled.

“If I’m going to be devoured, I prefer it to be by my children.”

Did she mean Rosélie was being devoured by Stephen?

On weekends the men did not set out to sea. Grandparents, parents, and friends streamed in from New York. The city dwellers’ cars jammed the streets while the tavern was always full. One Sunday Amy invited Rosélie and Stephen to lunch. Aaron, her youngest brother, with a mane of hair like Beethoven on the box sets of his complete symphonies, had just played Gustav Mahler in Paris and, together with his wife, Rebecca, had been horrified by the anti-Semitism of the French. What a terrible lot! Not surprising they produced a Drieu La Rochelle, Brasillach, Vichy, and Papon! Everyone had an anecdote to tell. The atmosphere became openly Francophobe.

“During the last war, guess what all the French soldiers wanted to learn in German?” Aaron asked.

“….”

“‘I surrender!’ They all wanted to say ‘I surrender!’”

As a rule, Stephen was the first to jeer at the French, but he liked nothing better than to sow dissension. In the midst of a chorus of laughter, he declared:

“I could turn Sartre’s phrase round at you. Instead of ‘It’s the anti-Semite who makes the Jew,’ ‘It’s the Jew who makes the anti-Semite.’”

Following a deathly silence, there was a general outcry. Stephen reveled in the effect he had produced and persisted.

“It’s the same with Rosélie. Her individualistic behavior provokes a reaction. She then interprets it from a perspective she has fixed in advance.”

Even Caleb, an overworked obstetrician, who only turned up at Montauk on weekends, stopped dozing in the sun beside his sons and came to join in the conversation. Amy was the shrillest of them all.

“Do you mean to say that racism doesn’t exist?” she exclaimed.

His eyes gleaming, a stray lock of hair across his forehead, Stephen was in his element.

“That’s not what I mean. Because American society is segregated, still today, even in New York, whatever they like to say, most whites, without being racist, feel a deep malaise in the company of a black person, and are extremely uncomfortable in their presence. The black has to be reassuring…”

The outcry turned into a racket. Everyone protested at the same time.

“Reassuring!” Amy shouted. “You’re asking the victims to reassure the perpetrators!”

“Reassuring! What are they afraid of?” Caleb asked.

“You have just given the exact definition of racism!” screamed Aaron. “For the white man, the black is not a human being like himself.”

Rosélie had been hearing this from Stephen for years. Every time she complained about his colleagues, the waiters in a restaurant, or the local shopkeepers, he made an excuse for their behavior and put the blame on her. She intimidated them by her aloofness, she disconcerted them by her silences. She didn’t laugh at their jokes.

“Smile!” he begged her. “You are so lovely when you smile. They’ll be so charmed they’ll be eating out of your hand.”

How can you smile at someone who doesn’t see you? Invisible woman.

The discussion was interrupted for lunch to sample the pièce de résistance, the goulash. It smoldered again over Mocha Java coffee, then flared up with the liqueurs, a Poire Williams and a Courvoisier cognac Aaron had brought back from Paris. For although France was a haven for anti-Semites, it still remained a paradise for fine eating. It finally went out when the visitors got back in their cars and left for New York. The next morning, lying beside her on the beach, Amy let slip her first criticism of Stephen, a prelude to many others.

“I don’t know how you can put up with such an insensitive man!”

Stephen, insensitive? Provocative, yes. He loved being politically incorrect.

During that particular vacation Rosélie did an oil painting, six feet by nine, that she called quite simply The Sea at Montauk. It was an infinite variety of grays. Caleb and Amy fell in love with it and bought it from her for several hundred dollars.

The reader who merely recites from a geography manual that New York is divided into five boroughs hasn’t a clue that Brooklyn, in fact, is another country, a continent in miniature. You reach it across a bridge, a lasso thrown from the high towers of finance, making a perfect arc over the barges on the river, finally anchoring onto the pillars of a freeway. The nature lover can lose himself in its miles of parks; the art lover can visit its museums. The visitor who is tired of eating beef, cheese, and other burgers, the unsavory culinary inventions of Caucasians without a palate, can burn his tongue in the cheap Jamaican eating houses and exchange his pints of insipid beer for a Bacardi or, even better, a five-star Barbancourt rum. You will find Latino-Americans, Caribbean-Americans, Korean-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans. Few Americans without a hyphen. It is the realm of the Haitians and the Hassidic Jews.

The Cohens lived in Crown Heights in an old twelve-room house, surrounded by a garden, a genuine park of rare trees, inherited from Caleb’s father, a wealthy trader gone home to confront the suicide attacks in Israel. The relaxed atmosphere of the neighborhood, where in the summer Amy would jog without a bra in a tiny pair of shorts and the children would play unsupervised in the garden and Caleb would walk back from the hospital at any hour of the night, had been dearly won. A few years earlier it had been the scene of some of the worst racial rioting. As a result, New York, even the entire country, had been almost swallowed up in an apocalypse of hatred. Then they had buried the dead. Wept. The purification of mourning had restored peace. Back to being themselves, everyone tried to live in harmony with their black, Jewish, or Asian neighbors.

Twice a week, Rosélie took the subway to Brooklyn.

It’s a well-known fact that the New York subway is unlike any other. It’s an Ali Baba’s treasure trove of violence and stench. Those whose heart is hanging on by a thread should be warned not to venture down there! Nutcases shove unsuspecting passengers under trains entering the station in a rattle of iron loud enough to deafen the deaf. Weirdos playing with knives can slash your face. Bums, junkies, and perverts have set up home there. Some of them beg in a tone of voice once used by criminals when they demanded your money or your life. Others exhibit sores and other disabilities to turn your stomach. Yet others shout the end of America is nigh, collapsing under the weight of its mortal sins. The reason why Rosélie braved so many dangers was that Amy’s company brought her infinite happiness. In her presence she rediscovered the forgotten sensation of being a person, a human being, unique, remarkable, perhaps created in God’s image. She was no longer an invisible woman. Amy showed interest in her, in her painting, her hopes, and her failings. When they were running together in the park, Rosélie revealed her wounds: those that endure forever, those that fester, and those that never heal. Amy, who had just admitted her incontinent and bedridden mother to a home for the elderly and hadn’t the courage to visit her, could understand Rosélie, since she was living the torment she herself had once lived.

“We haven’t abandoned them,” Amy asserted. “It’s because we love them too much to watch them deteriorate. I envy Caleb. He lost his mother when he was five. He hardly remembers her and has built a myth around her. Young, beautiful, and eternal. As for your father, fathers are made to be admired and respected. Yours made a bad job of it. It’s his fault if you felt nothing for him.”

Amy and Caleb’s house, with its ornate rooms, its heavy, old-fashioned furniture, and portraits of aunts and uncles, was a bit like the house she had grown up in. It was also like La América, minus the presence of Ariel.

Sometimes, Ariel, your absence is killing me.

For Amy and Caleb lived amid a constant stream of friends of every origin and every color who worshiped every type of god and expressed themselves in every type of foreign idiom. Among this crowd who turned up unexpectedly and sampled the goulash of an evening, once the children were asleep, Andy and Alice were the only ones who terrified Rosélie. Andy and Alice were a couple of African-Americans: Andy, obstetrician in the same hospital as Caleb, and Alice, a law professor at a prestigious white university.

Come now, the term Black American went out years ago. So did Afro-American. As for the word “Negro,” it is no longer pronounced. The Negro doesn’t exist.

The looks Andy and Alice cast at Rosélie thrust her back into insignificance. Oh, she was a painter, was she? With very little talent, judging by the picture The Sea at Montauk that Amy and Caleb, out of pure paternalism, had hung in the middle of their living room.

A child could do as well.

Or me.

They then insisted on calling her Rosalind, so different from Rosélie, and never apologized.

Stephen would faithfully go and fetch Rosélie of an evening for he didn’t like her taking the subway after eight at night. He was far from sharing her infatuation for the Cohens. Even though there had been no further quarrel of epic proportions with any member of the family, his presence always caused a certain embarrassment. In his opinion, Amy and Caleb belonged to that most dangerous of species, the right-thinkers. Their conversation resembled a digest of the newspapers they devoured, like priests consumed by their breviaries. They never had a personal opinion on art or literature. They expressed admiration for the plays, films, musical comedies, and art exhibitions they were supposed to admire. In politics, they were so careful not to hurt anyone, they agreed with all sides.

“Listen to them,” he sneered. “What a wonderful world we live in! Especially for the Arabs, blacks, Palestinians, Israelis, Indians, Pakistanis, Afghans, and Iraqis.”

Stephen had bought a station wagon off a colleague leaving for Australia, which was too big, three times too heavy, and guzzled too much unleaded gas. He hardly drove it, having failed to interest Rosélie in the surrounding natural splendors. Niagara Falls, water, water everywhere!

On the other hand, I’d like to visit the Grand Canyon and throw myself into the void like Thelma and Louise.

Rosélie loved the drive back home at night. They would take up their position in a slow procession of cars, as if they were following a hearse, and cross the bridge. Facing them, Manhattan opened up like a scene from an opera, ablaze with lights, where the skyscrapers represented the divas and portly tenors, painted and dressed in their shiny, frazzled costumes. Sometimes they would stop in a bustling restaurant where everyone was yelling at the top of their voices. Then they would go and listen to jazz in a basement club, squeezed up against each other, experiencing the same vibrations. Unexpectedly, the music conjured up the image of Ariel. The pain assumed the sounds of the muffled trumpet.

One evening Amy insisted they stay for dinner. It was Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. She had cooked a traditional meal of latkes and brisket in gravy. After they lit the menorah, a few friends sat down informally around the table in the dining room. Among them were the inevitable Andy and Alice.

The first half of the meal was monopolized by Andy in a solo performance. He showered his listeners with anecdotes at which he was usually the first and only one to roar with laughter. Example: Invited to a Hasidic wedding, something quite unprecedented, he met one of his patients, whose eight children he had delivered. As he held out his hand to shake hers, she had lowered her eyes and murmured: “I’m sorry, Doctor. I don’t touch men!”

Are you laughing?

The second half was monopolized by Andy and Alice in a duo. The previous summer they had made a trip to Nigeria, a pilgrimage, in fact, for they had both been in the Peace Corps there fifteen years earlier and had fallen in love with each other. The Peace Corps, ah! What an esteemed organization that brings modernity to Africa absolutely free of charge!

Really? I heard just the opposite. Some see in it the hand of the CIA.

During this second visit, their host had been no other than Wole Soyinka, the renowned writer, who had gone to great lengths to get the Americans to boycott his country. Nigeria, it should be recalled, although birthplace of the first African Nobel Prize winner, proved to be a dunce when it came to democracy. Andy and Alice described in length the prevailing incompetence, chaos, and corruption. No importance was placed on human life. The wonderful poet Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight members of his party had been hanged. Political rivals died a suspicious death in prison. Tribunals ordered adulterous women to be stoned, for women are the first victims of violence by their governments.

There are no dictatorships without sexism. Example: the Taliban and Afghan women.

Rosélie didn’t have time to meditate on such a negative vision of Mother Africa before Stephen took advantage of a brief pause in the monologues. He straightaway deplored the violence of black gangs in the United States. His words fell like stones dropped into the depths of a crevasse by a clumsy spelunker. The guests forgot to ask for seconds of the latkes. In a deathly silence, Stephen totaled up the number of blacks in high-security prisons and on death row, accused of murder, rape, and armed robbery, black criminals whose faces were splashed across TV screens.

“You’re forgetting they’re not all guilty,” retorted Andy, choking with anger. “American justice is so inhuman, it crushes the weak and the poor! Those who can afford to pay lawyers with their fat bank accounts are declared innocent. Whereas the others—”

“Even if these blacks appear guilty, and that’s the impression the police, the media, and the government want to give, they are, in fact, victims,” interrupted Alice impetuously. “Victims of the iniquity of the American social system.”

“Inhuman justice for the weak! Iniquitous social system!” repeated Stephen, with a fake naive expression. “American democracy is full of flaws!”

Andy and Alice agreed.

“So,” continued Stephen. “If I were an African-American, instead of meddling in the rest of the world’s affairs, I would sweep in front of my own door.”

Thereupon, he excused himself from dessert and, amid a deathly silence, headed for the door, dragging Rosélie with him. Once outside in the garden, he doubled up laughing. He was still laughing behind the wheel.

“Did you see their faces? The truth always produces the same effect.”

This episode, however, did not sound the death knell between Rosélie and Amy, as very well might have been the case. See the trouble with Fina.

It merely provided them with a new topic for discussion during their tête-à-têtes in the park.

“Admit he was rude,” Amy concluded. “Admit it. He was at the limit of racism. After you left, Alice cried, she is so sensitive. To make such a speech like that about African-Americans and their unending struggle.”

Rosélie tried to defend Stephen. Far from denigrating the glorious struggles of the past, and perhaps of the present, he was preaching for a little humility. He would like Andy and Alice to stop sermonizing, coming from a community who have been left out of the American dream, in which, moreover, nobody believes any longer.

Without admitting it, Rosélie was somewhat proud of Stephen. He had refused to be a mere onlooker, which she had so often contented to be. He had refused to be invisible and forced the Other to see him for what he is worth.

From that day on Alice and Andy treated Rosélie with somber compassion and no longer spoke to her. A sister who stays with a Caucasian of the most dangerous sort can only be pitied. Was it masochism? Certainly not! She was a living example of Mayotte Capécia’s complex of lactification, so magnificently denounced by Fanon. Him again!

“She is asking for nothing, demanding nothing, except for a little whiteness in her life.”

Stephen, the subject of so much disapproval, felt no remorse. However, he thought it wiser not to set foot again at Amy and Caleb’s. When he came to fetch Rosélie, he would sound his horn in front of the garden gate or send Mario to get her. Mario was an illegal immigrant. No job, however thankless, deterred him. He worked as a driver for Stephen, walked the Dalmatians for the second-floor tenants, washed the windows of the apartment on the fourth floor, and took the twins on the eighth to school. He also helped the old couple on the tenth to piss and bought them their ground beef, the only food their toothless mouths could eat. You didn’t dare whisper to him that his physique of a Greek god could have got him a less exhausting and more lucrative type of job.

Caleb took a liking for his curly head and dark eyes. He found him a job as a security guard. Mario therefore left Manhattan to the annoyance of all those whom he had helped. Henceforth, dressed in a heavy leather jacket, wearing a flat cap, and armed with a revolver that didn’t suit his gentle disposition, he monitored the comings and goings at the hospital and kept the undesirables at a distance.

At the start of the summer, Andy and Alice emerged from their silence and invited Rosélie to exhibit at an arts festival organized by an African-American association. Once she had got over her initial surprise, she realized that these good shepherds hadn’t lost hope of bringing their lost sheep back to the fold, in other words returning her to the Holy of Holies, the Race. What surprised her even more was that she was delighted by the invitation. Like a pariah suddenly invited to the master’s table. Like a condemned person suddenly pardoned and brought back to the company of the righteous.

She therefore turned a deaf ear to Stephen’s warnings. It was not just a question of exhibiting a few paintings, he recalled. In addition, each artist had to explain his work, his sources of inspiration, and his technique. Was she prepared for that, she who had so much trouble expressing herself? Piqued, Rosélie spent the night scribbling page after page.

The festival took place at Medgar Evers College. Situated in the very heart of Brooklyn, this imposing edifice, proudly named after a martyr, appeared to be one of the last bastions of that African-American grandeur so ignored on American soil. The president and board of directors, however, regretted there were so few native-born Americans, and far too many Caribbeans and Africans without a hyphen. The college now attracted first and second generations, born from successive waves of immigration, for whom racism, high tuition fees, and the lack of adequate training would have prevented them from studying elsewhere. There were also a great many white skins, the Latinos, often similar, alas, to the Caucasians. The corridors echoed more with the sounds of Spanish and Creole than those of Ebonics.

On that particular day, a crowd was streaming toward the college. And Rosélie in a daze thought she recognized tens of Aunt Lénas, Aunt Yaëlles, cousins, and uncles; so true seemed the saying, which everyone mistakenly thinks is racist, that all blacks look alike. In the yard a circle of curious onlookers were crowded around gigantic sculptures arranged close to the fountains. However hard she elbowed, she was unable to get a closer look. Alice and Andy had in fact mentioned an African-American sculptor who was taking blacks and whites alike by surprise.

She followed the crowd heading toward an amphitheater. It was on the way there that she was gripped by terror and almost turned tail.

Was she in her place, she who colluded with the oppressor?

Sleeping with the enemy.

Unfortunately, a hostess dressed with a headscarf fit for a Senegalese drianke and a boubou in rich brocade, seeing her hesitate, dragged her to the podium with the heavy hand of a revolutionary guard leading an aristocrat to the scaffold.

The panel was composed of six artists: three men and three women. Equality oblige. Scheduled for 9:00 a.m., the discussion began around eleven, as they had to wait for a technician to set up the microphones. The ten minutes allotted to each speaker was not respected, since each participant complained louder than the other about the difficulties of being a creator in a materialistic world, thirsting for consumerism and threatened by globalization. The most vehement — and also the longest — was the moviemaker. The black public was no longer what it used to be, he hammered out. It no longer encouraged its creators. It had taken a liking for sex, visual effects, and violence, white values that had corrupted it. As a result, the wonderful stories that made up the heritage of the black people, those stories transmitted from mouth to mouth, were destined to perish. These diatribes together with the earlier delays and the rigors of alphabetical order had disastrous consequences. When Rosélie’s turn came, just before Anthony Turley’s, the other panelists had left, and the auditorium strewn with paper cups and litter was virtually deserted. Amid general indifference, Rosélie churned out the paper she had taken so much trouble over. Moreover, she got the impression that the few people left did not understand a word she was saying because of her accent.

“How about lunch?” he proposed.

Anthony Turley could boast of an impeccable pedigree. His family, originally from Alabama, tired of dying from hunger on land gone to waste practically ever since the South had been defeated, had left for Detroit. There they had found themselves as poor as before, but this time deprived of air and light, and imprisoned in the urban ghetto. The men, embittered, beat their women and raped their prepubescent daughters. He was the fruit of one of these family dramas. His mother, raped at the age of twelve by her uncle, had committed suicide in despair shortly after his birth. He had been raised by his grandmother, gone crazy from the brutality and abuse of numerous common-law husbands. Anthony had grown up on food stamps, spent vacations at summer camps for underprivileged children, and got through his studies with the help of scholarships for needy gifted children. In spite of all that, his entire personality radiated a gallant charm and an impression of joyful strength. You could guess the little boy and teenager he had been, tripping over corpses on the sidewalk and determined against all odds to get the most out of life, as he hummed his way along. He wouldn’t have been out of place on a basketball team, for he was well over six feet tall. Not an ounce of fat. Nothing but muscle. His head shaved, as shiny as a mirror, a mischievous gold loop in his left ear, and an easy laugh with the accents of a clarinet.

They crossed the yard, forcing their way through the crowd still gathered in front of the sculptures.

“Have you seen my work?” he asked. “I was very surprised to be invited to this festival. I hadn’t got much attention until The New York Times wrote a few lines about me, and now things are starting to change.”

A helping hand, that’s what I need! Who will give me a helping hand? To bring me out of the shadows where I am foundering. The wings of an artist need to be caressed by the light, otherwise they fold and wither like stumps.

There’s an unexpected charm about this neighborhood. They crossed a majestic avenue. Then he guided her through a maze of streets filled with little girls showing their chocolate-colored legs as they jumped rope, little boys running across imaginary baseball fields and old folk clutching walkers, and finally, they reached a restaurant called Nature. Yes, kids often took him for Michael Jordan and asked for an autograph. But once they had deciphered his signature, they went away disappointed. Sometimes young girls insisted on taking their photo with him. They often accepted a rendezvous. When he told them his real name they would shout insults at him as if he had wanted to cheat them. One of them had even tried to sue him.

Anthony had invented a substance that was a mixture of clay, resin, melted metal, ground glass with shards of flint and quartz, baked in an oven at a very high temperature. He used it to sculpt animals and creatures of his imagination, trees, and plants. Never humans.

He changed his tone of voice and became serious.

“I listened carefully to what you said…”

What did I say? Rosélie had merely repeated Ariel’s theory: Art-is-the-only-language-that-can-be-shared-on-the-surface-of-the-planet and blah, blah, blah. Nothing very original.

“I don’t agree at all on what you said about nationality, especially race. Aren’t you proud to be black?”

Me? Proud?

I’d like to be a Hindu princess combing her long hair from a window in the palace. The prince passes by on horseback and tramples on this billowing stream that flows into the forest.

He took offense.

“Don’t you ever feel bitter when you think of all the evil they have done us?”

My good friend, I’m an egoist. I am more concerned about the failure of my present than the wounds of our past.

“I’m not talking about the past. They’re still doing us so much harm.”

They’re not alone. They are joined by a cohort of those who wear the same skin color as ours.

He lost his temper.

“Don’t you think it’s time for us to take our revenge?”

Revenge? Revenge is not for me. I fear I would never succeed, since I’m in the category of losers.

“That’s why I never sculpt humans. I create a world where they and their brutality, their craving for discovering, conquering, and dominating don’t exist. A world without Adam and Eve and their descendants of ruffians.”

Rosélie livened up. But this world without perpetrators, and therefore without victims, is basically no different from the one I dream of. Without race. Without class. Without borders.

“Utopia!” he said severely, shrugging his shoulders. “Come back to earth.”

Then, quite illogically, looking straight into her eyes, he took her hands and asked sweetly, but solemnly:

“When can you visit my studio? Be my guest. It’s situated in the very middle of the Detroit ghetto. I bet you’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like a war zone. Sometimes junkies scrounge a few dollars off me. Just to get a fix. My best friend Joe got twenty years for a rape he didn’t commit. In the end, his DNA saved him. He didn’t harbor any grudge. Allah came to him in jail and now he’s a fervent disciple. His dream is to convert me.”

There was an aura of immense seduction about him. How tempting to imagine oneself naked, screwed between his massive thighs!

No! Never again! Rosélie firmly shook her head. They would not see each other again!

And yet Rosélie and Anthony Turley saw each other a few weeks later at an exhibition on the Dogons of Mali. Ever since Marcel Griaule spent the night at Sanga over seventy years ago, the Dogons rank number one in the hit parade of African peoples. To what can we attribute this fascination? Whatever the explanation, the Soho Museum had re-created the famous cliffs at Bandiagara and shipped by plane three emaciated old men, exact replicas of Ogotemmeli; apart from the fact that their guns had not gone off in their faces while shooting at a porcupine, their eyes were still intact and “their brown tunics, drawn at the seams, were frayed by wear like an old battle flag.” The exhibition curator was explaining to a group of visitors the metaphysics and cosmogony of the Dogons, as rich as Hesiod’s, when Anthony and Rosélie bumped into each other in front of a “household mask.” They exchanged that loaded look tinged with longing of those who had wanted to go to bed together and hadn’t, then awkwardly shook hands. She could make out the surprise at the back of his eyes.

What the hell are you doing with this white guy?

If only he knew the truth! She almost burst into tears.

“What a stud! How did you meet him?” Stephen asked in surprise.