The Story of the Cannibal Woman

SIXTEEN

When she showed up again in his office, Olu Ogundipe had that worried look of someone who has sighted a hurricane looming on the horizon. Yet Rosélie had nothing threatening about her. Instead she was rather shattered and slumped into an armchair. Around her on the walls, all of Olu’s beloved heroes stared down at her fixedly. Always the same reproach. What had she done for the Race?

“What have you come to give me this time?” Olu said mockingly, not at all hostile. “Another computer?”

She didn’t answer, tortured by a sudden urge to burst into tears. He was quick to see it and took an even softer stand.

“I was about to leave. My wife isn’t too well, it’s her allergies, I have to go and pick up my older children from school. Would you like to come with me? We can have tea at my place.”

She hesitated, and once again he poked fun at her.

“You’re a pretty woman. But this isn’t a trap. We know how to behave. Do we frighten you?”

Telling him that she hadn’t always been the mistress of a white man and that her first partner had been an African would serve no purpose. The stereotypes about Antillean women die hard. They are supposed to hate and despise Black Skins. Rosélie hadn’t the energy to put up a fight and she let him talk away.

“I know the Caribbean. I lived for three years in Kingston and came up against all sorts of humiliations. I’ve nothing against my in-laws. Admirable people. But Cheryl’s family and friends accused her of soiling her sheets with a nigger, black like me. If we ourselves don’t like our color, how can we blame the whites for not liking it?”

All this time he was signing a dozen letters with a majestic flourish.

They went out and crossed the deserted recreation yards that echoed with students’ voices from every classroom, chanting lessons and singing a cappella. The sounds merged and composed an unexpected and appealing polyphony.

Olu got onto his favorite subject of conversation: the future of South Africa.

“You’d think Césaire had this country in mind when he wrote The Tragedy of King Christophe. Do you remember? ‘So here we are at the bottom of the ditch! The very bottom of the ditch! I’m talking of a spectacular ascent!’ I think it’s the most wonderful piece of theater. What do you think?”

Rosélie had only read Notebook of a Return to My Native Land by Césaire, which Salama Salama recited by heart. He dreamed of putting it to rap, cleverly beating out the lines:

“Get lost I said you cop face, you pig face, get lost, I hate the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Go away bad grigri, bedbug of a monklet.”

In the end, the fear of sacrilege stopped him.

Without being disheartened by so much ignorance, Olu continued.

“Give us a few more years and we’ll be the leaders of Africa! I’m not talking only in economic terms, gross national product, gross domestic product, but in terms of culture.”

Art and culture are necessary compensations for the misfortune of our lives. (Once again.)

They reached the car. The ageless Nissan uttered a series of coughs and started up. The cheerful aspect of the school, a Catholic day school, made it look out of place in the general landscape. Olu’s older children turned out to be three kids of an unexpected coffee color ranging from nine to twelve years. They spontaneously held up their cheeks for Rosélie to kiss and she was filled with emotion by such a gesture. It was as if they, the children, absolved her and were giving her back the place the adults had excluded her from.

Olu lived in Esperanza, a district still under construction on the outskirts of Cape Town. Neither township nor residential suburb. Its inhabitants belonged to the laboring middle class trying to emerge from the ashes of apartheid. His villa, like all the others, was surrounded by a concentration camp — type wall, topped by thick rows of barbed wire. And behind, you could hear the barking of hounds, straining furiously on their chains.

“Gangs operate around here,” he explained. “Loafers and good-for-nothings who don’t want to do a day’s work. Let’s not close our eyes, there’s a lot to be done. I’ll quote once more The Tragedy of King Christophe: We are ‘schoolteachers brandishing a ruler in the face of a nation of dunces!’”

A nation of dunces? Did Césaire say that? Not a very nice remark!

Three other small boys, again coffee colored, ranging this time from four to six years, were playing in a patch of garden. They broke off to hurl themselves on their father with Sioux-like yells, then, in a charming ensemble, held up their warm cheeks for Rosélie, who, this time, almost burst into tears. The living room looked like Olu’s office, but more chaotic. The leather sofa and three armchairs were streaked with scratch marks, the Moroccan rug lay crooked. The same dusty photos. In their frames the great men, now dust to dust, struck a sorry pose. Okay, they left behind their books. But who reads them? What is their legacy?

Nobody reads anymore. Everyone watches American sitcoms on television.

My favorite: Sex and the City.

Olu was proud of a set of snapshots placed on top of the inevitable piano in petty bourgeois interiors, between the inevitable bunch of artificial flowers.

“You see,” he said, priding himself, “that’s Césaire and me at Saint-Pierre in Martinique. This is Césaire and Cheryl. He liked her a lot. And here we are all three of us, Césaire, Cheryl, and me, at Le Diamant. Behind us the famous rock. Do you know Martinique?”

Rosélie shook her head. In the Caribbean she only knew Kingston, Jamaica, where she had gone with Salama Salama to a reggae festival. She didn’t remember much about this paradise turned hell on earth under the combined effects of crack and ganja. They had been advised to stay in their suite at the Sheraton because of the violence. She had lived in a cloud of smoke and only went out to lie by the pool in the shape of a peanut. When Salama Salama wasn’t around, a barman from the Dominican Republic served her trujillos, an explosive mixture of rum, lemon, cane syrup, and tomato juice with a dash of Marie Brizard, while leering at her breasts. According to Salama Salama, his concert, which she hadn’t attended, had been a triumph.

“I’ve been to Trinidad, Montserrat, Antigua, and Barbados,” he bragged again. “Haiti is my favorite island. The most African, the only one of its kind, you could say. That’s where I really felt at home. You know what the Haitians call a man, whatever his color? A Nègre. The day will come when Noirisme, that theory they’ve so distorted, will be rehabilitated.”

Then he disappeared to look after his wife, leaving Rosélie faced with a lukewarm glass of Lipton teabags served up by a domestic in none-too-clean overalls. Large families live in an atmosphere of disorder created by the children — toys lying about on the rugs, teatime remains left on the table, and a constant noise of squabbling, tears, and cries, things that stab at the heart of the lonely. Sitting in this unattractive room where the windows covered by a grid of solid bars let in little light, Rosélie had never felt so vulnerable. She was reminded of the tribe she had grown up in, on days spent at the beach with aunts, uncles, and cousins. It required half a dozen cars to transport everyone, dozens of hampers to carry all the food, and at least three iceboxes for the drinks. Rose, of course, didn’t accompany them. No question of undressing in public ever since a little nephew had compared her in a fit of laughter to Bibendum, the Michelin Man. But Elie was there, trim and muscular, swimming agilely in his striped swimming trunks.

What was she doing in Cape Town among people with whom she had nothing in common? Their language seared her tongue. The taste of their cooking insulted her palate. Their music was no music to her ears. Everything was foreign to her. Suddenly, she couldn’t understand herself. Her faithfulness to Stephen’s memory and her intention to remain at his side seemed absurd. Mrs. Hillster was right: “The dead are always alone.”

After a while, Olu reappeared and announced:

“Cheryl would like you to stay for dinner.”

Rosélie refused straightaway. She didn’t want to intrude. She just wanted Chris Nkosi’s address. A mask of hostility immediately covered Olu’s face.

“Why? What do you want to know?” he asked.

Rosélie hesitated. What did she want to know?

“He was a good, hardworking boy,” Olu continued. “Quiet and obedient, until the honorable doctor, your husband, came and filled his head with stupid and dangerous ideas about the theater. Afterward, he liked to think himself as an artist. We didn’t know what to do with him. He almost failed his exams. He wanted to leave the country. Go to London. Did he have any money? Was he forgetting his color? He’d become a filthy immigrant, parked in a slum, the prey of skinheads. Who knows if he wouldn’t end up in jail? Or else convert to Islam and become a terrorist.”

It was obviously a joke. Rosélie gave a faint smile.

“It was in England I met Cheryl,” he continued. “That’s where we got married. I know what I’m talking about. What city is more racist than London? Its reputation as a multicultural paradise is an invention of intellectuals like Salman Rushdie, who, besides, emigrated to the United States.”

“I’d like to have a talk with Chris Nkosi,” pleaded Rosélie, who, despite the meandering conversation, had not forgotten the purpose of her visit.

“Talk about what?” he shouted angrily. “Leave him alone, for goodness’ sake! He’s deserved it.”

A worried look flared up at the back of his eyes. But she looked so unhappy that he sighed, went into his study, and came out grudgingly brandishing a piece of paper.

Chris Nkosi,

Govan Mbeki Primary School,

116, Govan Mbeki Street,

Hermanus, CO

“His wife’s pregnant,” he announced as if it were something important. “By this time, she might have given birth.”

Thereupon he dived back into his study. In short, if for Olu, Stephen’s bad influence boiled down to encouraging Chris, then it wasn’t anything very serious. In N’Dossou, a class of twelfth-graders had made a name for themselves performing brilliantly The Importance of Being Earnest on the occasion of the twenty-third birthday of the president’s fifth wife. (He had repudiated the first three. The fourth, who had opened a center for handicapped children and a maternity clinic, died in childbirth and was christened the African Evita Perón, the Holy Mother of the Nation. Way out in the bush, a thousand workers labored on the construction of a basilica in her honor that was to rival St. Peter’s and Yamassoukro’s in Côte d’Ivoire.) Some jealous folk had criticized this Westerner, this Stephen Stewart, in L’Unité, the single party’s single rag. In their opinion, staging The Importance of Being Earnest was not along the lines of Authenticity, but rather those of Alienation. Rosélie felt oddly reassured, without, however, admitting what she had feared.

She was deep in these troubling thoughts when Cheryl Ogundipe, draped in a black kimono and wearing a somewhat doleful expression, emerged from her bedroom.

O Love, you are a mischief maker. You’re rightly depicted as a blind god. You pounce without distinction on your prey and light the fires of passion.

Looking at Cheryl, even the keen eye of a Caribbean, apt at distinguishing the most subtle shades of color, would have hesitated. You could have mistaken her for a Scandinavian, given her fawn-colored torsade, her eyes the color of seawater, and her Cleopatra nose. She had a face studded with freckles. As if she had looked at the boiling sun of her native island through a sieve.

Rosélie reproached herself for being so surprised. Such contradictions are frequent. The brain, the heart, and sex, each goes its own way. Olu’s brain had followed the path of black activism. His heart and sex had led him into the trap of a mixed marriage. For Cheryl was the daughter of a white Jamaican Creole, descended from planters who had lost all their possessions, and an Irish mother whose family had never had any.

Outside the Caribbean, islands and continents drift to and fro. Borders lose their meaning. Differences become blurred. Languages no longer matter. Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba fit into one another like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle finally put together again. Immediately the conversation between these two Caribbean women took on an intimate tone.

“Olu says you don’t want to go home to Guadeloupe?” Cheryl inquired.

She too said “go home.” Go home to the island like going back into your mother’s womb. The unfortunate part is that once you’re expelled you can never go back. Go back and curl up. Nobody has ever seen a newborn baby turn back into a fetus. The umbilical cord is cut. The placenta buried. We have to walk bent double, but walk even so till the end of life.

“In some respect I can understand you. I swore I would never set foot again in Jamaica. When I was little I suffered agony. Because of our color, my brothers, my sisters, and me, the “guava whites” as you say in Guadeloupe, we were excluded. There was no place for us in the country of the Maroons. Twenty years later I return with a black husband. They find him too black. They make fun of his accent. They call him “alien.” But you can’t be serious about staying here. However much I adored Nigeria — we lived in Ibadan, I buried my firstborn and gave birth to two of my sons there, then there was the vitality, the music, and exuberance — this place makes me sick. It’s as if a shroud is covering it and underneath there is nothing but dead bodies. What’s more, if things go on as they are, AIDS will kill off all the blacks and the epidemic will have succeeded where the Afrikaners failed. That’s what causes all my allergies. It’s psychosomatic. Unfortunately, Olu will stay here until we’re both dead. He’s waiting. He’s hoping, day after day, for a nomination.”

Him too! Oh, these nominations, nominations for what, nominations for where, they are the aspiration of those whom revolutions and regime changes have passed by. They’re as slippery as an eel. Lucky are those who can catch one.

Two of the youngest children came in crying the never-ending tears of childhood. Cheryl patiently calmed them down and sent them back to their games.

“Yes, I had a daughter once, the first and only one,” she continued. “I carried her for eleven months. She clung to me, she didn’t want to let go. When finally the doctors extricated her from my womb with their forceps, she was dead. I too thought I was going to die. Ever since, I’ve had only boys. Why haven’t you had any children? It’s children, and children alone, who can brighten up our sad lives.”

Did I brighten up my parents’ lives? Decidedly not.

“Didn’t you want to have children?” Cheryl insisted.

It’s much too long a story. Let’s just say that first of all I didn’t want to be a mother. Then motherhood didn’t want me when perhaps I wanted it. Sometimes, I confess, I’ve dreamed of a son who would be both brother and lover. But I didn’t come here to talk about myself.

“Do you know Chris Nkosi?”

“Perhaps,” Cheryl replied with a shrug of the shoulders. “As if we don’t have enough on our hands with our own children, Olu takes care of all sorts of young people. He runs I don’t know how many associations. Boys and girls come and go at all hours of the day, sleeping, eating, and drinking. One of them, a handicapped teenager, stayed here for over a year. Olu stood up for him. Apparently his family thought he brought bad luck and his own mother wanted to kill him. In the end, I lose interest.”

The somewhat frugal dinner that followed was filled with babbling, while ketchup and glasses of Coca-Cola spilled over the tablecloth, fortunately made of plastic. Cheryl reigned over everything with a gentleness that reminded Rosélie of Amy and Cousin Altagras. Some women make the decision to be a mother, nothing else, and stick to it. They close their ears to all the sirens of so-called success.

In the meantime, Olu carried on spouting vacuously.

Once the dinner was over and they had drunk the lemongrass tea, Cheryl and Rosélie promised to see each other again. A promise they would probably not keep, given the way their lives went in opposite directions. Olu offered to drive Rosélie back to Faure Street if she accepted to stop by the church of St. John the Divine in Guguletu, where he ran a choir on behalf of the unflagging Arte. As long as the mouth is filled with songs to the glory of God, it is not smoking marijuana!

In spite of its grandiose name, the church of St. John the Divine was a modest building of clay and straw. Inside there were rows of rough wooden benches. A poorly decorated high altar. It was revered throughout the country because the funerals of a number of ANC members assassinated by the police had been held there. It was from his humble pulpit that bishop Koos Modupe, as feisty as Desmond Tutu, even though he didn’t win the Nobel Prize — you know what I think about prizes — had given his famous sermon, shamelessly plagiarizing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream.”

All the Holy Joes look alike. At the back of the main nave, two nuns, as skinny as rakes, their nonexistent breasts flattened further by their navy blue serge wimples, kept thirty or so boys and girls at arm’s length, while a third, who was obese, beat out the rhythm perched on a platform. An invisible fourth was playing the organ way up in the rafters.

The choir was splendid.

From the throats of these gangly, ill-dressed teenagers, marred by malnutrition and deprivation, came celestial voices, the mystery of the language adding to the poetic power of the chant. Rosélie, who hadn’t set foot inside a church since Stephen’s funeral, knelt down, reliving the wonders of her childhood: Midnight Mass, Easter, and the Crowning of the Virgin Mary, all those ceremonies whose magic memory occasionally haunted her. She would have liked to lose herself in prayer like Rose, like the women in her family. She would have asked God for strength and courage in the trial she knew was looming like a huge black cloud over her head.

If the guidebooks call Hermanus the “whale capital” of South Africa, it is with good reason. Countless tourists can prove it. Standing in the right place on the cliffs, they have sighted with their own two eyes the humps of these beloved mammals piercing the metallic surface of the ocean. Many of them too have seen with their own two eyes whales, pregnant and heavier still, hastening toward the shore to deliver the fruit hidden in their swollen flanks. Sometimes they die before reaching the sheltered bays and their corpses float on the ocean waters like gigantic rubbery balloons. There is even a whale crier in Hermanus, dressed like a lighthouse keeper, who struts around in season with a loudspeaker through which he yells the latest sightings.

Hermanus lies seventy miles east of Cape Town. It takes about ninety minutes along the N2. But Papa Koumbaya insisted on driving the scenic route through Gordon’s Bay to show Rosélie the splendid views. Add to that the way he crept along, and you can understand why it took three hours to drive a relatively short distance. Then they crawled along streets uniformly lined with souvenir shops and fish restaurants, congested with cars, buses, and pedestrians. In short, the morning was almost over when the Thunderbird drove into the black township. Finally it stopped in front of the Govan Mbeki School, even more forbidding in appearance than the Steve Biko High School. Behind a wall topped with broken glass and the inevitable rows of barbed wire, a rectangle of yellow prefabricated buildings lined a recreation yard, as bare as a monkey’s behind. In a stifling room a young woman was typing on a typewriter that would have fetched a fortune in an antique shop. She did not even trouble to look up with her answer.

“Chris? He’s teaching. Come back at noon.”

It was half past eleven. Rosélie went back to the sidewalk and agreed to meet Papa Koumbaya later on in the center of town in front of the Paradise Ice Cream Parlor.

The black township of Hermanus was a jumble of small houses, shacks, and huts built from bits of corrugated iron, wooden planks, bunches of straw, wattle, dried mud and bricks, everything the ingenuity of misfortune can scrape together. Here, like in Khayelitsha, there was not a single flower, bush, or tree. A bare, reddish earth. As if Nature balks at growing anything green around shacks. Rosélie didn’t dare venture far from the school. What sort of a welcome would she get if she explored these alleyways? She was so used to hostility she imagined the inhabitants would come out on their doorsteps, yelling at her to go home, hurling insults, even stones. But didn’t she look like an intruder, even a spy, standing there in front of this walled enclosure?

After some time that seemed an eternity to Rosélie, the students filed out in a disciplined, orderly fashion, whereas boys and girls the world over jump for joy, whoop, and let off steam once school is out. The teachers followed somberly, carrying their briefcases. The same story of pitiful wages, poor housing, and no future was written all over their faces, obvious to anyone who knew how to read. Chris Nkosi looked younger, less handsome, and thinner in his crumpled, shabby clothes. He had shaved his dreadlocks, and his face, now exposed, appeared morose and unsmiling. Nothing like the conceited, confident Puck she remembered leaping over the stage. Before she had even made a move, he had recognized her and made straight for her.

“You? What are you doing here?” he asked savagely.

“I came to see you,” she stammered.

“To see me? Why?” he asked, just as infuriated.

She didn’t reply, stifled by his ferociousness. He grabbed her roughly by the arm and dragged her away.

“We can’t stay here. Everyone’s looking at us. Let’s go to my place.”

They set off into a maze of alleyways. As they delved deeper into this poverty, it was the cleanliness that was so amazing. For we always associate poverty with filth. Here, there wasn’t a single garbage heap. Not one animal dropping. Not a single piece of litter on what served as a sidewalk. Chris walked so fast, without any consideration for her, that she was out of breath, running like a child to catch up with him. Finally they arrived in front of two shacks separated by a narrow passage that led to a kind of tenant’s yard, also kept meticulously clean. The ground was covered with a mixture of gravel and white sand. Kitchen utensils were drying in the open. Dazzling lines of ragged washing were waving in the breeze. Chris pushed open a door into a living room that was about as dark and sparsely furnished as you get, and shouted:

“Brenda!”

A very young woman appeared, almost a teenager, in her last stages of pregnancy, shuffling along with a huge belly and heavy legs. He hurled a few words at her in their language and she turned and headed for the door like a frightened animal, without a glance at Rosélie.

“What have you come for?” he asked again.

Feeling weak, she collapsed into the only armchair and tried to regain her calm.

“I’ve come to give you Stephen’s computer.”

He frowned as if he had heard a bad joke.

“What do you expect me to do with a computer? We don’t even have electricity in the district. They’ve been promising it for over a year. But we’re still waiting for it.”

She couldn’t find anything to say.

“We’re in South Africa here, you know,” he sneered. “Not in America.”

“I’m not American,” she protested. “I’m from Guadeloupe. A country poorer than yours.”

Was she hoping to move him? He gestured in a way that signified he didn’t care whether she came from Mars, then repeated:

“What are you here for? What do you want from me?”

She didn’t know what to say. She could no longer understand why she was here.

“Your uncle told me you quarreled with Stephen,” she stammered.

“And so what?” he asked roughly.

Discouraged, she got up. This conversation was getting them nowhere. She headed for the door, mumbling an apology for having disturbed him for no reason, when he called out to her.

“You’ve probably just realized that your Stephen was a bastard, haven’t you? Not at all the liberal, role model of a professor, benefactor of the young, whom everyone adored. A bastard!”

She turned round to face him, and with the determination of someone who wants to know, she quietly asked:

“Why are you saying that? What did he do to you?”

“Me?” he repeated.

There was silence. Suddenly he began to yell. He was not that far removed from the disproportionate tantrums of childhood. With a distorted face, he became unrecognizable.

“He was a liar and a manipulator. He promised me the world. That he’d get me a scholarship to study in London. He said he had connections at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I’d become an actor. I’d be another Paul Robeson. Better than Laurence Fishburne. I believed him. I believed him. Whereas, in actual fact…”

He collapsed onto the table, whimpering like a baby. She went over and placed a hand on his shoulder. He started.

“Don’t touch me!”

He sobbed for a long time while she stood motionless behind his back. He finally got hold of himself and methodically wiped his eyes, his cheeks, and his entire face. Then he stood up, jostling her almost, and coldly declared:

“I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you want to know. Besides, the police have already questioned me. At the time of his death I was in Hermanus, at Tanikazi’s, a neighborhood bar, playing darts. Twenty people can testify to the fact. Then I went home. Brenda and I made love. She can testify to that too.”

He stared at her spitefully.

“Someone else had the courage to do it, someone about whom he cared fuck-all like me. If I knew his name I’d give him a medal, a medal for doing good.”

“If you hate him so much,” she asked, amazed she could keep her calm in spite of these provocations, “why did you cry at his funeral?”

“Why?”

He looked around him, distraught, started to cry again, this time silently, and his distress moved her more than his rage. After a while he stammered:

“I was remembering the time when…”

“What?”

She had screamed. It was too painful, she now had proof, she was not the only one Stephen belonged to. Others possessed images and memories she could not share. Without answering, he wiped his face again in the same methodical way. She stood just a few steps away, close enough to touch him, breathing in his smell, a pleasant smell of cheap eau de cologne and tobacco. He stared at her with dark, piercing eyes through a forest of eyelashes curled from his tears. He looked so young. He could have been her nephew. Or rather the son Salama Salama so persistently demanded, the son she at times had wanted. A wave of pity tinged with tenderness welled up inside her and surged toward him.

This truce made her grow bolder, and very quietly she ventured:

“What exactly was there between you two?”

He fluttered his eyelids like someone aroused from his sleep.

“What was there between us two?” he repeated. “What do you mean?”

She was already frightened and ashamed of her question. He looked at her again.

“What do you think there was between us?” he said in a childish tone of voice.

He laughed stupidly.

“You’re crazy! There was nothing between us. I adored him because he was my teacher. He taught me everything.”

Wasn’t that what she wanted to hear? Without insisting further, she walked out.

Brenda seemed to be waiting for her in the yard. With a smile she motioned to her to come over. Rosélie had trouble understanding. But Brenda insisted. Surprised, Rosélie obeyed and followed her into a room. A narrow shop. A girl was standing behind the counter leafing through an old illustrated magazine. Just about everywhere bunches of flowers were heaped on the ground, in front of the door, on tables, shelves, and window ledges, as round as suns, as rigid as ginger lilies, cut out from recycled cans of Ovomaltine, Nestlé’s condensed milk, Lazzarro coffee, Mozart cocoa, Del Monte tomato paste, Baci di Dama biscuits, Gustoro olive oil, and drums of motor oil, gas, and paraffin. The effect was stupefying. The humble room had become a petrified magic garden. The old dream of alchemists seemed to have come true. A hand had transmuted base matter and changed it into gold.

“Madam, buy?” Brenda articulated with difficulty.

Worried, quite rightly, at not being understood, she immediately forced a bunch into Rosélie’s hands.

“Did you make these?” Rosélie asked.

Brenda nodded and proudly handed her a business card that looked like the ones she had had printed for herself.

On your visit to Hermanus,

Don’t miss Brenda’s Garden

No. 17. Lane 3. Alley A.

So she’s an artist too. In her fashion. Wasn’t she teaching her a lesson? A lesson of courage. Her flowers were born in the heart of the ghetto, in the midst of poverty, at the heart of life’s ugliness. Filled with admiration, Rosélie looked at her. Despite her drawn features, covered with the heavy mask of pregnancy, she was pretty. If it hadn’t been for her belly, you would have mistaken her for a small boy. The inevitable shaved head. The high cheekbones. A slightly curled upper lip revealing pearly-white teeth. At the end of her slender arms, her hands were surprisingly strong, with nimble fingers. Hands made to deliver beauty under any circumstance. If only Rosélie could have communicated with her instead of being content with smiles and superficial gestures. She had the feeling they were standing on either side of a river or on a harbor wharf watching a ship leave, separated by the inexorable space of the ocean. Just in case, she scribbled down her address and telephone number and explained that she too was a painter. If Brenda came to Cape Town, would she come and see her studio? Did she understand what she was saying? She nodded reassuringly and mumbled a few incomprehensible phrases. Then, with the graceful simplicity of a child, she kissed her. Rosélie was expecting anything but that. What did that kiss mean? Was it a customary gesture of politeness, the way Olu’s children had kissed her? It couldn’t possibly be a symbol? The symbol of her reintegration!

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.